This Is Me

I'm a nurse. I like game of thrones, dogs, and snowboarding. I guess that's it?

[cranquis]

TSK: Chief Complaint “2 y/o with fever and runny nose x6 hours”

Cranquis: … so this virus will probably stop causing fevers within the next 2 days, and as long as he keeps drinking liquids meanwhile, he’ll be just fine.

Mom: BUT YOU’RE GOING TO GIVE HIM ANTIBIOTICS FOR THE INFECTION RIGHT.

Cranquis: Well, if there were any signs of bacterial infection on his exam, I would definitely do that. But this is a viral infection, and viruses just giggle when they see antibiotics.

Mom: NO YOU GUYS HAVE STRONGER ANTIBIOTICS THAT KILL ALL THE VIRUSES TOO AND YOU’RE GOING TO GIVE HIM SOME BECAUSE I AM SICK AND TIRED OF HIM GETTING VIRUSES EVER SINCE HE STARTED DAYCARE 6 MONTHS AGO.

Cranquis: That’s the unfortunate nature of daycare – kids share all their viruses around a lot. On the plus side, he’ll have a much healthier immune system by the time he starts school and–

Mom: HE WON’T EVEN SURVIVE TO START SCHOOL AND WHEN HE DIES BECAUSE OF THIS VIRUS IT’S GOING TO BE YOUR FAULT FOR NOT GIVING HIM ANTIBIOTICS. THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING YOU CAN DO TO KEEP HIM FROM GETTING VIRUSES.

Cranquis: Well, funny you should mention it, because I noticed he hasn’t had a flu shot yet, and the flu is a virus that could actually kill him, so a flu shot could help keep him from getting a deadly virus.

Mom: I’M NOT PUTTING THOSE CHEMICALS IN HIS BODY HE NEEDS TO FIGHT IT OFF ON HIS OWN.

…and some people say that if you put your ear up to the door of Urgent Care Exam Room 4 today, you can still hear this conversation taking place on an infinite loop until the eventual heat-death of the universe…

[scienceshenanigans]

[vettedeveryday]

Details are important. Decimal places, conversion factors, and 3-way stopcocks kill.

[copingnurse-deactivated20240217]

When I’m looking around for a grown up nurse, but then I realize I am the grown up nurse there...

[welcometoyouredoom]

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“The Grey Brother Who Smelled of Summer“

It is best if I am honest about how the idea for this thesis came to me, and every ASOIAF fan who also keeps track of HBO’s adaptation knows what it is: the on-screen death of Summer.

I am ashamed to say that before this, I had written an exclusive essay about almost every major point of Bran Stark’s character except his direwolf, a massive blindspot all things considered. He is a warg, the direwolf is on his house’s banners, a Stark’s direwolf is the physical incarnation of their soul, and the fate of one usually mirrors the fate of the other. I guess you don’t appreciate something until you lose it.

But when I read the news that Summer would die in the Cave (on the TV show at least), the immediate reaction I had was, “No, that’s not right. This makes no thematic sense.” This essay is an unpacking of all the deep-seated reasons that I felt Summer would not die in that context in the coming books.

As detailed in my other essays, Bran Stark’s narrative is a modern iteration of an old English and Welsh myth, the Fisher King. While the Fisher King story has different facets and running subthemes, the essential one is the crisis of infertility and physical affliction, wherein the King’s injury is reflected in the realm. The King’s power, and thus his realm, is restored when his virility is restored. Summer, from his name to his function as a character, is basically a fertility symbol.

There are three ways that Summer acts as a symbol of fertility and virilty:

His name(s): Both the nature of his name, and how/why he was given it, set himself and thus his master as an archenemy of the Long Night, an evil that is their destiny, decided long ago, to save their people from.

His physical appetites and vitality: Summer is everything that Bran’s human body cannot be. He is powerful, can run, hunt and force others to obey him with raw strength. Summer also has animalistic hunger and impulses that Bran increasingly feels are his own

Summer is a Wolf Prince: As Bran develops the warg connection, he increasingly understands warging is not acting out a fantasy of being a wolf prince; rather, it is means through which he is a prince himself. Summer, with his strength and cunning, is an avatar of Bran’s will that projects real power in his world and to those around him. Summer is both the essence of his inner nature as a virile prince, and means by which it is actualized.

The story of how Summer is shaped as this especially significant creature starts at the chronological beginning, with his naming. 

“His name is Summer”

It is unique in two respects. One, he is one of two whose name does not describe a physical attribute that’s apparent to a human (only his litter mates think of him as the one who “smelled of summer”) Even Lady’s name describes in some sense the physical bearing of herself and Sansa, in which the former once nips a bit of bacon, “dainty as a queen,”(rather odd for an apex predator). Second, it is the only one that is described on page.

When Bran is first bonding with Summer, he does not know what to call him,

He was still trying to decide on a name. Robb was calling his Grey Wind, because he ran so fast. Sansa had named hers Lady, and Arya named hers after some old witch queen in the songs, and little Rickon called his Shaggydog, which Bran thought was a pretty stupid name for a direwolf. Jon’s wolf, the white one, was Ghost. Bran wished he had thought of that first, even though his wolf wasn’t white. He had tried a hundred names in the last fortnight, but none of them sounded right.-Bran, AGOT

At this stage in the story, Bran still believes that he is going to train as a knight in the South, or even be on the Kingsguard, and he still does not know the true nature of his home of Winterfell, his ancestor the Builder, or the source of their magic. Most importantly, he doesn’t truly know why his ancestor built his castle, because like almost every other character he takes the Others as being utterly mythical or at least long, long gone. Bran cannot think of a name cause he has not seen himself in a powerful enough contrast to know who he is, and because he does not know who he is, he does not know his direwolf. That changes with his fall from the Broken Tower and during his coma experiences his initiation as a greenseer:

Finally he looked north…he looked past the Wall, past endless forests cloaked in snow, past the frozen shore and the great blue-white rivers of ice and the dead plains where nothing grew or lived. North and north and north he looked, to the curtain of light at the end of the world, and then beyond that curtain. He looked deep into the heart of winter, and then he cried out, afraid, and the heat of his tears burned on his cheeks. 

Now you know, the crow whispered as it sat on his shoulder. Now you know why you must live. “Why?” Bran said, not understanding, falling, falling. Because winter is coming. Bran looked at the crow on his shoulder, and the crow looked back. It had three eyes, and the third eye was full of a terrible knowledge.-Bran, AGOT

In art and literature the fundamental qualities of a person, thing or color can be shown more clearly by pairing it to an opposite. Contrasts can illuminate. Bran’s experience of staring into the Heart of Winter is just such a moment of illumination. This is when he looks his ancestor’s greatest enemy in the face, the one the Builder dedicated lifetimes of work and wars to preparing his people for, the true Winter of their House words. When Bran emerges from the coma and announces that his direwolf’s name is Summer, it springs from an unconscious understanding of how he is an archenemy of the evil coming for Westeros, set in opposition to it on an elemental, cosmic level. An Other is the embodiment of winter, and he is embodiment of summer. It is of death, and he is of the life source, Winterfell with its hot springs and heart tree.

The phrasing involved speaks to the origin of the name as well. When Bran awakes from his coma, he puts his hand on the direwolf and says, “His name is Summer.” Bran does not say, “I name him…” or “I will call him…” The operative verb is “IS”; This implies the name was pre-existing and fundamental.

Bran himself is called by this when Old Nan blatantly challenges him, “Oh sweet summer child, what do you know of fear?” To the extent that his 8 year old mind can verbalize, everything now.

The Grey is Strong

As Bran unconsciously understands how his existence is contrasted with the apocalyptic Long Night, he also contrasts the direwolf with his human body in every way. Where Summer can run, he is paralyzed. Where Summer can fight and kill, Bran is “helpless as a baby, no more able to defend himself than Rickon.” Bran’s bemoaning of his “brokenness” touches upon sentiments similar to the Fisher King’s sense of being emasculated as a result of his injury. The warg connection will evolve, as Bran is trained to use Summer to be strong, and that they are “two and one,” as Jojen phrases it. As with marriage, (and remember, Haggon refers to a warg bond as exactly that): two bodies, one soul.

Jojen’s first comment upon Summer is to contrast him with Shaggydog:

“The black one is full of fear and rage, but the grey is strong… stronger than he knows.”(Bran, ACOK)

Through the grey color of his fur, Summer is tied by this quality to Winterfell itself and its ancient stones. Not utterly savage and uncontrollable, but as Bran says, “the smartest of the litter”, able to endure through hardship and catastrophe. Tyrion remembers Winterfell as a place that lasts: “There had been a great strength in those stones, a sense that within those walls a man might feel safe.”

While warging Summer, Bran thinks that he is “strong and swift and fierce.”(Bran, ASOS).

As the warg bond develops, the direwolf’s appetites, cravings and impulses become indistinguishable in Bran’s mind from his own.

Fairly early on, Bran fantasizes a way that Summer is a means to be truly free, thinking that if he was a wolf, “I could live in the wood and sleep when I wanted.”(Bran, ACOK) He would take not orders from a caretaker-maester.

More ominously, in the same passage he fantasizes about how being a wolf could mean using violence and killing to help his family and (implicitly) get revenge for the maiming he has suppressed the memory of, “I could find Arya and Sansa. I’d smell where they were and go save them, and when Robb went to battle I’d fight beside him like Grey Wind. I’d tear out the Kingslayer’s throat with my teeth, rip, and then the war would be over and everyone would come back to Winterfell. If I was a wolf.”

Eventually, Bran makes the connection that Summer can and will murder for him, and makes a very real threat to do so, telling the Walders, “Summer would tear your fat head off.” Summer is right there, and is one command away from doing just that. The direwolf’s strength can make real Bran’s desires, especially his violent ones.

At times, Summer’s thoughts and sensations become manifest in Bran’s mind, and this happens even before he realizes that he is a warg,

It is too hot here, and too noisy, and they are all getting drunk. Bran itched under his grey and white woolens, and suddenly he wished he were anywhere but here. It is cool in the godswood. Now steam is rising off the hot pools, and the red leaves of the weirwood are rustling. The smells are richer than here, and before long the moon will rise and my brother will sing to it.-Bran ACOK

Bran is referring to Shaggydog as “his brother,” as the wolves all do with one another, and so as his thoughts drifted and his mental barriers weakened, the boy became the wolf.

In their wanderings Beyond the Wall, this was intensified by their state of starvation. Mid-sentence, the sensations of the direwolf are spoken of as being directly possessed by Bran:

I am him, and he is me. He feels what I feel. Sometimes Bran could sense the direwolf sniffing after the elk, wondering if he could bring the great beast down… The direwolf could sense the warm blood coursing beneath the elk’s shaggy hide. Just the smell was enough to make the slaver run from between his jaws, and when it did Bran’s mouth would water at the thought of rich, dark meat.-Bran, ADWD

Bran sometimes dissociates from his human body, almost speaking as if he were neither wolf nor human, but an entity or soul that was both but also separate:

Of late Bran wore Summer’s body more often than his own…he could see farther and hear better and smell more than the boy in the basket.-Bran, ADWD

Notice the phrase, “the boy in the basket,” as if that human body is not Bran.

Prince of the Green, Prince of the Wolfswood

Summer increasingly acts as an avatar of Bran’s will, and maintains the role of “prince” even when he is exiled from Winterfell. In some sense, Bran retains his royal status because of his direwolf.

The first moment where this is hinted at is during the meeting in the great hall of Winterfell between Robb, Bran and Tyrion. The direwolf’s immediately distrust and hate Tyrion, and move to intimidate or even kill him.

“Perhaps it’s time I took my leave,” Tyrion said. He took a step backward… and Shaggydog came out of the shadows behind him, snarling. Lannister recoiled, and Summer lunged at him from the other side. He reeled away, unsteady on his feet, and Grey Wind snapped at his arm, teeth ripping at his sleeve and tearing loose a scrap of cloth.

“No!” Bran shouted from the high seat as Lannister’s men reached for their steel. “Summer, here. Summer, to me!”

The direwolf heard the voice, glanced at Bran, and again at Lannister. He crept backward, away from the little man, and settled down below Bran’s dangling feet.

Robb had been holding his breath. He let it out with a sigh and called, “Grey Wind.” His direwolf moved to him, swift and silent. Now there was only Shaggydog, rumbling at the small man, his eyes burning like green fire.

“Rickon, call him,” Bran shouted to his baby brother, and Rickon remembered himself and screamed, “Home, Shaggy, home now.” The black wolf gave Lannister one final snarl and bounded off to Rickon…-Bran, ACOK

There significant aspect of this progression of events is that it’s Bran who takes control. Bran is the first to command his wolf, and Bran who thinks quickly enough to tell Rickon to do the same. Not Robb who “had been holding his breath.”Again and again, Summer has to restrain Shaggydog when he gets wild and violent.

While on the run, Summer quickly establishes himself as the top dog wherever he goes. (Significantly, he and Nymeria are the only direwolves who have their own wolf packs. All others are shown to be mostly loners except for their littermates). Or more descriptively, a “prince. The man-sound came into his head suddenly, yet he could feel the rightness of it. Prince of the green, prince of the wolfswood. He was strong and swift and fierce, and all that lived in the good green world went in fear of him.” In the process of naming himself a prince, Bran/Summer attaches several qualities of fertility and virility to himself. His domain is the “good green world”, a place of blooming life such as trees, grass, bushes, and other animals. Being the strongest of them all, all these creatures “went in fear of him.” His authority over this world comes directly from physical power, and his ability to use it to kill and eat what he wants. He cements this characterization, fittingly, by a contrast. He refers to either Sansa or Arya those who have gone into the “halls of man rock, where other hunters ruled.” (Since both by this time have gone to Harrenhall/Kings Landing, he could be referring to either. The picture is made less clear because the human is not distinguished from the direwolf, it’s hard to know). What is clear is that in the good green world, Bran/Summer is the ruler.

Interestingly, both direwolf and Bran each are called by the other’s name or title at some point in the series. Bran is the “summer child”, and the wolf is “the prince.” The names themselves each embody the twin themes of the Fisher King myth, that of fertility and authority.

Summer immediately exorcises the prerogative of all lords; seizing a share of others’ food, especially those weaker than him and using lethal violence:

And then there was only the head wolf to face.

Long they fought, rolling together over roots and stones and fallen leaves the scattered entrails of the prey…One angered him so much that he whirled in a black fury and tore out the attackers throat. After that the [smaller wolves] kept their distance. And as the last red light was filtering through green boughs and golden, the old wolf lay down weary in the dirt, and rolled over to expose his throat and belly. It was submission.

The prince sniffed at him and licked the blood from fur and tom flesh. When the old wolf gave a soft whimper, the direwolf turned away. He was very hungry now, and the prey was his.-Bran, ASOS

At this point, Summer is very much like Bran. Just as Bran cannot control his warg power for the betterment of his human friends, the direwolf has no intention of taking this pack for his own and leading it. He takes what he wants and gives them nothing in return as the ideal leader is meant to. With training, that begins to change, and eventually Bran is able to use Summer for the sake of his friends just as Summer takes control of his first pack.

Then the two rushed together, wolf and direwolf, and there was no more time for thought. The world shrank down to tooth and claw,…they fought until the both of them were ragged and fresh blood dappled the snows around them. But finally the old one-eyed wolf lay down and showed his belly. The direwolf snapped at him twice more, sniffed at his butt, then lifted a leg over him.

A few snaps and a warning growl, and the female and the tail submitted too. The pack was his.-Bran ADWD

Through a Watsonian perspective, Bran/Summer’s encounter and fight with the One-Eyed Wolf is random, an aside that it’s easily missed and ignored especially given the other events of in Bran’s chapters; the likely cannibalism, Coldhands, the Three Eyed Raven and the discovery that some of the Children of the Forest are still alive.

But a Doyalist perspective shows how GRRM went out of this way to stage this, and out of all that happens to Bran in ADWD, this one of the most important moments significant moments in his character arc, a way in which he acts upon the world. In practical terms, it is small. In symbolic ones, it’s huge.

GRRM spent the prologue chapter developing the character of Bran’s enemy, with his origin and personality all serving as a counterpoint to the young prince. First and foremost, Varamyr is a profoundly selfish human being who, even after being taught a set of moral codes, ignores them to satisfy his own desires, where Bran is a boy who is given no moral “do-nots”. Where Bran ultimately heeds and cares for his mentors (especially Luwin and Jojen), Varamyr cruelly betrays Haggon for no other reason than that he has the power to do so.

However, the most relevant contrast between Bran/Summer and Varamyr/One-Eye is around their origin and the ambitions. Varamyr is Free Folk of humble origin; none of his ancestors were monarchs, lords or great heroes. Bran is descended from the one of the oldest Houses of Westeros and a legendary hero king. Brandon the Builder helped defeat the greatest evil humanity has ever known and created its greatest architectural wonders with a combination of genius, giants and magic with the purpose to defeating that enemy again should it ever return.

And their ambitions could not be more different, either. Bran resists his training as warg, lord and greenseer at almost every step of the way, once he ascends to to one level to tries to hang on desperately onto it to resist yet more change. But ultimately he accepts the Stark-in-Winterfell’s peculiar model of lord-as-steward of the people, puts his duties, and inability to perform them in the forefront of his mind.

“A good lord protects his people.”-Bran, ACOK

’The Prince of Winterfell.’ Of Winterfell burned and tumbled, its people scattered and slain,” and wonders in despair, “How can you be the prince of someplace you might never see again?”-Bran, ASOS

Varamyr uses his skinchanging to make himself the petty lord over several surrounding clans of Free Folk. He represents and acts out the worst in predatory lordship; he steals and blackmails for food, he forces the tribes to give him women and girls to rape as tribute.`And he aspires to more. He dreams of being King-Beyond-the-Wall, and when he sees Jon and Ghost, and sees how untrained Jon is as a warg, he wishes to steal the direwolf because that would be “a second life fit for a king.” And when he faces his death, he is utterly abandoned by the gods who gave him his gift. Where Bran speaks to the weirwoods and is answered, seeks comfort and is comforted, Varamyr is met with judgement and silence in the moments before his death.

Varamyr could see the weirwood’s red eyes staring down at him from the white trunk. The gods are weighing me. A shiver went through him. He had done bad things, terrible things…’That was the beast, not me,’ he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘That was the gift you gave me.’ The gods made no reply.-Prologue, ADWD

So it with every bit of poetic irony intended that in his second life, Varamyr is defeated by the King in the North’s heir, a Prince of Wintefell, and above that, compelled to obey and follow him along with what was his pack. It is not just that Bran is a better person than a Varamyr, that he is more deserving of leadership. It is that Bran triumphs because he is stronger. It is the most pure expression of might being right, that legitimacy is inherit in the most powerful, capable of rulers. theelliedoll summarized this Fisher King ideology as so:

The myth thus presupposes a mystical, inextricable, sympathetic connection between king and kingdom that requires of the king a potent, generative virility, and thus functions, the myth, as the symbolic narrative that articulates a dominant power ideology.

Bran’s conquest of Varamyr is a small albeit pure narrative expression of his right to rule, affirming his physical and mystical power over others through a living symbol of himself and his royal lineage: the direwolf.

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My Favorite Thing About Bran

[Robb’s] fingers closed into a fist, crushing Sansa’s letter between them. “And she says nothing of Arya, nothing, not so much as a word. Damn her! What’s wrong with the girl?” Bran felt all cold inside. “She lost her wolf,” he said, weakly, remembering the day when four of his father’s guardsmen had returned from the south with Lady’s bones. Summer and Grey Wind and Shaggydog had begun to howl before they crossed the drawbridge, in voices drawn and desolate.

When I first read this scene, I took up the reading that most others seem to: Bran is mourning Lady’s loss; it is a small plea for sympathy.

This is a really subtle moment in Bran’s spiritual growth; it’s not a plea for sympathy. Though he yet can’t put it into words, he’s realized something that his other siblings don’t even as of ADWD: the direwolf is more than just a symbol of power, it is a source of power.

Bran knows that Sansa didn’t write that letter of her own free will, and why: She has no one to protect her, because she has no direwolf, and to not have a direwolf at your side is to be powerless. A Stark is their direwolf, and vise versa:

It sounded stupid, high and hollow and quavering, a little boy’s howl, not a wolf’s. Yet Summer gave answer, his deep voice drowning out Bran’s thin one, and Shaggydog made it a chorus. Bran haroooed again. They howled together, last of their pack.-Bran, ACOK

This is my favorite thing about Bran. For someone who is so young and naive, he is deeply in tune to his siblings and thinks about them all the time:

[the wolves] were his now. They were pack.

No, the boy whispered, we have another pack. Lady’s dead and maybe Grey Wind too, but somewhere there’s still Shaggydog and Nymeria and Ghost. Remember Ghost?

Bran is such the embodiment of the utterly sincere and caring monarch, like Arthur and other fairytale kings. It begins with his siblings, but it grows to include everyone around him, including Hodor and the Reeds:

He sent sweets to Hodor and Old Nan as well, for no reason but he loved them.-Bran, ACOK.

“His greendreams.” Meera’s voice was bitter. “Hodor,” said Hodor. Meera began to cry. Bran hated being crippled then. “Don’t cry,” he said. He wanted to put his arms around her, hold her tight the way his mother used to hold him back at Winterfell when he’d hurt himself.-Bran. ADWD

He is dutiful and proud to serve as a ruler:

“As you will, my prince,” said Ser Rodrik. “You did well.” Bran flushed with pleasure. Being a lord was not so tedious as he had feared.-Bran, ACOK

Why must he waste his time listening to old men speak of things he only half understood? Because you’re broken, a voice reminded him. A lord on his cushioned chair might be crippled, but not a knight on his destier. Besides, it was his duty. -Bran, ACOK

He was old enough to know that it was not truly him they shouted for. Still, it made him swell with pride.-Bran, ACOK

I won’t be afraid. He was the Prince of Winterfell, Eddard Stark’s son, almost a man grown and a warg too.-Bran, ASOS

And he’s good at it:

She is looking at me, Bran realized. He had to make some answer. “My brother Robb is fighting in the south,” he said, “but you can say your words to me, if you like.”…. Bran groped for words. Was he supposed to swear something back to them? Their oath was not one he had been taught. “May your winters be short and your summers bountiful,” he said. That was usually a good thing to say. “Rise. I’m Brandon Stark.”

The old knight’s white mustache was pink with wine. “You have done well, Bran. Here, and at the audiences. You will be an especially fine lord one day, I think.”- Bran, ACOK

And as wise and spiritually aware as his training as lord and greenseer is making him, Bran is so fortunate that when he returns he will have sisters who have cunning and can lie because, this child has no guile:

“No.” He did not like to talk about the dreams. “A prince should lie better than that.” Osha laughed.

We should steal horses like Meera wants,” Bran said, “and ride to the Umbers up at Last Hearth.” He thought a moment. “Or we could steal a boat and sail down the White Knife to White Harbor town. That fat Lord Manderly rules there, he was friendly at the harvest feast. He wanted to build ships. Maybe he built some, and we could sail to Riverrun and bring Robb home with all his army. Then it wouldn’t matter who knew I was alive. Robb wouldn’t let anyone hurt us.” [Hodor] was the only one who liked Bran’s plan, though. Meera just smiled at him and Jojen frowned. They never listened to what he wanted, even though Bran was a Stark and a prince besides, and the Reeds of the Neck were Stark bannermen.

Other examples: Bran describing sex as two people “lying on top of each other”; Bran wanting to joust with Hodor and on and on.

Bran is fit to rule because he does literally everything except play “The Game”. He does exactly the sorts of the things that kings should be doing but that in the narrative they always sideline: Robert prefers to hunt and drink; Robb’s reign is almost entirely waging war (at his audiences “he spoke the words so awkwardly that even Bran took note; it was a speech he had learned, not words from the heart”) and Renly preferred to watch tourneys and feast rather than deal with the affairs of his subjects. Bran’s chapters give us the purest example of a truly beneficent and attentive king (as opposed to a queen, Dany) who deals with the essentials of castle repairs, storing food, taxes and the needs of the peasants. He’s the only ruler who does this on page with any sincerity other than Dany.

So when Bran, his character and his arc are described as being about magic and not ruling, and that he is an exploration of the shaman-trope rather than fairytale king, I shake my head and think, “They….they skimmed Bran’s chapters, didn’t they?” 

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Few of the original Great Houses of Westeros got that way by historical accident. In almost every single one of their histories, they have some great “Thing” that empowered them to conquer their neighbors and hold that position through the ages. The nature of that “Thing” defines the character of the family and the way that they wield power.

For one House, the source of their power is a castle that is immune to siege and sits on actual mountain of gold. Another came to power through the strength of a warrior queen and the cultural knowledge of her exiled people. Yet another appears to have descended from a fertility demi-god that took offerings in exchange for bountiful harvests and healthy children.

House Stark built the seat of their power around a huge talking tree that takes human sacrifices.

So, there’s no room for an “if” in the statement, “It’s almost as if Winterfell is alive.” It is alive. It is a structure that projects clear signs of sentience. When it does so, most of the time it is to tell non-Starks and non-northerners that they are not welcome within its most sacred spaces: the godswood and the Crypts.

“Catelyn had never liked this godswood…It was a dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for ten thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it...”-Catelyn, AGOT

“[Tyrion] remembered their godswood… That wood was Winterfell. It was the north. I never felt so out of place as I did when I walked there, so much an unwelcome intruder.”-Tyrion, ACOK

“Ned Stark’s tree, he thought, and Stark’s wood, Stark’s castle, Stark’s sword, Stark’s gods. This is their place, not mine.”-Theon, ACOK

He dreamt he was back in Winterfell, limping past the stone kings on their thrones. Their grey granite eyes turned to follow him as he passed, and their grey granite fingers tightened on the hilts of the rusted swords upon their laps. You are no Stark, he could hear them mutter, in heavy granite voices. There is no place for you here…I am no Stark, and this is not my place. His crutch slipped and he fell to his knees. The crypts were growing darker. -Jon, ASOS

The Kings of Winter in the crypts bear swords on their laps, the traditional denial of guest right. This refusal of entry is sensed by non-Starks such as Osha, Theon, and Hodor, who are afraid to enter, but Bran very pointedly is not only not afraid, he feels safe and welcome among them: “He had never feared the crypts. They were part of his home and who he was, and he had always known one day he would lie here, too.”

The fact that Bran the Builder chose to build his castle around an already living weirwood, that his descendants gave human sacrifices to that tree, that the ground is not leveled, that it has been expanded over the centuries in an organic, asymmetrical way and is the stronger for that, that the Kings of Winter entomb themselves at the roots of that “monstrous stone tree” in a way that parallels the greenseer and the weirwood, with wolves carved in at their side no less…well, the reader can regard all this in a few different ways.

The reader could decide to separate Bran and the question of his future from the historical context of his own family. They could regard the associations of Bran’s name, the fact that it is also the name of the first King of Winter, its meaning in Welsh (”Raven”), the similarity of his plotline to both the Last Hero and the Welsh king Bran the Blessed, as being an “erroneous” theory that has resulted from reading to much into word choice, as GRRM recently declared many fan theories to be at a recent conference.

The reader could do that.

Or, the reader could read the legacy of Stark kingship, of Starks in Winterfell, not as having green magic as addendum, an aside, but as essential to it as the gold of Casterly Rock is to the Lannisters. The simplest and most holistic explanation for the connection between the Last Hero and Bran the Builder is that they were same person, and the reason the story of the former was cut so short was a deliberate attempt by GRRM to not totally give the show away so early on.

Perhaps the Builder/LH was born a greenseer before he searched for the Singers; perhaps he was given that power then and there when he finally reached them. Either way, the magic he gained through whatever pact he made with them also made Winterfell and the Wall possible, and “their ancient magics [won] back what the armies of men had lost.” He found them in their “hollow hill”, (much like the ones Bran and the BwB are in now) and there he and his descendants were laid to rest, while the castle above was built on and around its weirwood grove. That is why the ground was never leveled, and why its construction is so irregular. It is by the virtue of the fact that Winterfell is a melding of castle and weirwood, and that its first ruler was both king and greenseer, that it has endured through the ages. Despite the brutal winters and razings, it has continued to grow and thrive, and House Stark with it. Magic and politics are not separate for the North, because the Starks’ political power has traditionally flowed from magic. Greenseeing and demi-godhood does not separate Bran from Stark kingship; it is the basis of his claim. There is no greater source of knowledge on Winterfell and how to govern it than the heart tree. And the only one who can tap into it is Bran.

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An Analysis of Winterfell: As Camelot, Avalon, and Sacred Tree

[Tyrion] remembered Winterfell as he had last seen it. Not as grotesquely huge as Harrenhal, nor as solid and impregnable to look at as Storm’s End, yet there had been a great strength in those stones, a sense that within those walls a man might feel safe.-Tyrion, ACOK

“You had no right! That was our place, a Stark place!”-Bran, about the crypts of Winterfell, in ACOK

The weirwood was the heart of Winterfell … but to save the castle Jon would have to tear that heart up by its ancient roots, and feed it to the red woman’s hungry fire god. I have no right. Winterfell belongs to the old gods.” -Jon, ASOS

GRRM once remarked, with some disappointment, that many readers of his books were unfamiliar with the fantasy writers that came before him, such as Tolkien and Robert Jordan. ASOIAF acts as an epic story in his own right, but also homage, commentary, and reimagining of the tropes, storytelling structures and themes they used.

The tradition of literary fantasy in which ASOIAF operates goes even deeper, incorporating mythical imagery from Celtic paganism and early medieval romances.

It is natural then, that the seat of House Stark is defined by a similar mixture of influences. Winterfell is a blending, sometimes metaphorical, sometimes literal and very often meta-textual, of Arthur’s Camelot, his resting place of Avalon, and the sacred tree worshipped by Celtic pagans such as Bran the Blessed.

Searching for Camelot

“Arya’s place was Winterfell, only Winterfell was gone.”-Arya, AFFC

“I am Stark of Winterfell, she longed to tell them.”-Sansa, ASOS

“Bran,” he said sullenly. Bran the Broken. “Brandon Stark.” The cripple boy. “The Prince of Winterfell.” Of Winterfell burned and tumbled, its people scattered and slain…how can you be the prince of someplace you might never see again?

There is a sad parallel in the way that all three of the primary Stark POVs have come to believe that Winterfell is truly gone forever before they begin their training under their respective mentors. Not privileged with the perspective of the reader, they do not know that the skills their new mentors are teaching them are meant to take them back to Winterfell, not replace its role in their lives.

Camelot is described as the pinnacle achievement of chivalric virtue by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his recounting of the legend,

"Camelot, the great stones and marvellous works of iron, lying under the ground, and royal vaults, which divers now living hath seen. Wherefore it is a marvel why he is no more renowned in his own country, save only it accordeth to the Word of God, which saith that no man is accept for a prophet in his own country. Then all these things foresaid alleged, I could not well deny but that there was such a noble king named Arthur, and reputed one of the nine worthy, and first and chief of the Christian men ; and many noble volumes be made of him and of his noble knights”

In Arthurian legend, Camelot and the Round Table fall because of the chain of violence and death that results from the love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere; essentially a moral sin among Camelot’s inhabitants causes its collapse. Camelot’s disappearance from legendary time parallels how it disappears from historical record, its exact location totally uncertain (if it was a literal place at all, or like King Arthur himself, simply an amalgam of different historical characters into an otherwise obscure figure, in this a case what was likely a Welsh/Breton warlord).

Winterfell is now similarly out of reach for the Starks. Arya in particular faces the torment of constantly trying to find it, but never being able to:

Her home was gone, her parents dead, and all her brothers slain but Jon Snow on the Wall. That was where she had wanted to go. She told the captain as much, but even the iron coin did not sway him. Arya never seemed to find the places she set out to reach.Yoren had sworn to deliver her to Winterfell, only she had ended up in Harrenhal and Yoren in his grave. When she escaped Harrenhal for Riverrun, Lem and Anguy and Tom o’ Sevens took her captive and dragged her to the hollow hill instead. Then the Hound had stolen her and dragged her to the Twins. Arya had left him dying by the river and gone ahead to Saltpans.-Arya, ASOS

Sansa, too, hopes in vain that the person who was effectively her kidnapper, was taking her home:

“You look distraught. Did you think we were making for Winterfell, sweetling? Winterfell has been taken, burned, and sacked. All those you knew and loved are dead. What northmen who have not fallen to the ironmen are warring amongst themselves. Even the Wall is under attack. Winterfell was the home of your childhood, Sansa, but you are no longer a child. You’re a woman grown, and you need to make your own home.”-Petyr to Sansa, ASOS

The fact that they idealize and whitewash their childhood in Winterfell is a direct result of their exile from it. Just as Camelot is a perfect subject for fictionalization because its location is vague and even unknowable, the fact that the Starks are so distant from their home means it can be fictionalized to a great degree as well. The remembrances of Bran and Sansa in particular are notable for what they lack. She afterwards doesn’t even think of the times she insulted her sister (with Septa Mordane’s tacit support), and nor does Bran really. He also doesn’t ever take note, if he even was able to notice due to his very young age, Jon’s outsider status or his mothers’ vocal frustration with his climbing. Sansa seems to even have subconsciously distorted her relationship with Arya:

She remembered a summer’s snow in Winterfell when Arya and Bran had ambushed her as she had emerged from the keep one morning.  They’d each had a dozen snowballs to hand, and she’d had none. Bran had been perched on the roof of the covered bridge, out of reach, but Sansa had chased Arya through the stables and around the kitchen until both of them were breathless.  She might even have caught her, but she’d slipped on some ice.  Her sister came back to see if she was hurt.  When she said she wasn’t, Arya hit her in the face with another snowball, but Sansa grabbed her leg and pulled her down and was rubbing snow in her hair when Jory came along and pulled them apart, laughing.-Sansa, AFFC

If we keep in mind that the Sansa we met in AGOT was not a rough-and-tumble person, and was a “lady at three,” she likely was not so happy about being snowballed as she remembers.

Just as important is that the Stark POVs craft an image of their home that strongly reflects their own particular hardships and sense of loss. For Bran, it represents his rightful place as its lord and ruler, the heir to thousands of years of Starks in Winterfell:

What was he now? Only Bran the broken boy, Brandon of House Stark, prince of a lost kingdom, lord of a burned castle, heir to ruins.-Bran, ADWD

He had never feared the crypts. They were part of his home and who he was and he had always known that one day he would lie here, too.-Bran, ACOK

Arya’s memory is defined by her strong connection to the wolf, her wolfish nature and pack values. Thus, Winterfell is the “pack” (i.e. the family), that she has lost:

I have no home, Arya thought. I have no pack.-Arya, ASOS

Then, so faintly, it seemed as if she heard her father’s voice. "When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives,” he said. “But there is no pack,“ she whispered to the weirwood. Bran and Rickon were dead, the Lannisters had Sansa, Jon had gone to the Wall.”-Arya, ACOK

For Sansa, Winterfell stands as for lost social status as a lady of an ancient house, her noble blood, not the bastard Alayne that she is forced to pass herself off as:

I am stronger within the walls of Winterfell.-Sansa, ASOS

I am not your daughter. I am Lord Eddard’s and Lady Catelyn’s. The blood of Winterfell.-Sansa, AFFC

Once your lady mother intended that very thing, but I was trueborn then, and noble.-Sansa, TWOW

Sansa directly calls her childhood in Winterfell the subject of a “song”, ASOIAF’s equivalent of the romance poetry through which King Arthur’s legend, and his Camelot, are passed down to us: “I thought my song was beginning [the day I left Winterfell], but it was almost done.”

The end of that song is also in some sense the end of Camelot, which is as much a time as it is a place. Arya in particular understands it as a victory of evil over good:

Arya, the lone wolf, still lived, but the wolves of the pack had been taken and slain and skinned.-Arya, ASOS

Winterfell, she might have said. I smell snow and smoke and pine needles. I smell the stables. I smell Hodor laughing, and Jon and Robb battling in the yard, and Sansa singing about some stupid lady fair.-Arya, AFFC

Also figuring heavily into their memories are what they know see as paragons of virtue and goodness, utterly without flaw, its lord and lady: Ned and Catelyn.

“I must be as strong as my lady mother.”-Sansa, ACOK

I should kill them myself. Whenever her father had condemned a man to death, he did the deed himself with Ice, his greatsword. “If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look him in the face and hear his last words,” she’d heard him tell Robb and Jon once.-Arya ACOK

Back in Winterfell, they had eaten in the Great Hall almost half the time. Her father used to say that a lord needed to eat with his men if he hoped to keep them. “Know the men that follow you,” she heard him tell Robb once, “And let them know you. Don’t ask your men to die for a stranger.”-Arya, AGOT

Ned is no doubt the most genuinely caring father we see in the series, but that does not mean he was without flaw. He allowed Sansa and Septa Mordane to mistreat Arya for years, in such a way that has caused her lasting emotional pain and insecurity, and he allowed his best friend Robert Baratheon to brow beat him into giving Sansa’s hand in a marriage pact that even a little vetting would have revealed was a bad idea. Ned was a man of his time and place, and thus like others in the series was to some extent observant of its conventions, including those that were misogynist. In a clever play on the notion of Camelot, it isn’t lost because of a lack of virtue, it’s lost because Ned and his son Robb try but fail to do what’s best for their family (as well as a series of unfortunate circumstances outside their control) which starts in plot-time with accepting the Sansa and Joffrey betrothal, and is continued with Robb’s decision to marry Jeyne Westerling.

But that doesn’t matter, because both Ned and Cat’s martyrdom has transformed them into the sort of saintly medieval lord and lady that GRRM had explicitly intended to deconstruct, with the castle they ruled from viewed from such rose colored glasses as to be comparable in peacefulness as to be like Camelot. Not for the first time in ASOIAF, GRRM’s narrative acts as a commentary not just on the tropes themselves, but how and why they are created in the first place in a meta-commentary on fiction itself.

Winterfell as a Tree, the Crypts as Avalon

From the outset, Winterfell is described as being more than just an unusually strong castle; it is somehow sentient and alive, assymmetrical and with a will of its own:

To a boy, Winterfell was a grey stone labyrinth of walls and towers and courtyards and tunnels spreading out in all directions. In the older parts of the castle, the halls slanted up and down so that you couldn’t even be sure what floor you were on. The place had grown over the centuries like some monstrous stone tree, Maester Luwin told him once, and its branches were gnarled and thick and twisted, its roots sunk deep into the earth.

[climbing] taught him Winterfell’s secrets too. The builders had not even leveled the earth; there were hills and valleys behind the walls of Winterfell.-Bran, AGOT

Those that are not northern feel unwelcome in its godswood:

Catelyn had never liked this godswood…It was a dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for ten thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it...-Catelyn, AGOT

[Tyrion] remembered their godswood… That wood was Winterfell. It was the north. I never felt so out of place as I did when I walked there, so much an unwelcome intruder.-Tyrion, ACOK

Ned Stark’s tree, he thought, and Stark’s wood, Stark’s castle, Stark’s sword, Stark’s gods. This is their place, not mine. I am a Greyjoy of Pyke, born to paint a kraken on my shield and sail the great salt sea.-Theon, ACOK

The Crypts of Winterfell and the “stone kings” who rest there forbid the entry to any who are not patrilineal Starks with the same gesture that Catelyn encountered when she went to see Ned in the Godswood: a sword across the lap, a denial of guest right, unintended or not,

Last night [Jon] had dreamt the Winterfell dream again. He was wandering the empty castle, searching for his father, descending into the crypts. Only this time the dream had gone further than before. In the dark he’d heard the scrape of stone on stone. When he turned he saw that the vaults were opening, one after the other. As the dead kings came stumbling from their cold black graves, Jon had woken in pitch dark, his heart hammering. Even when Ghost leapt up on the bed to nuzzle at his face, he could not shake his deep sense of terror. He dared not go back to sleep. -Jon, AGOT

He dreamt he was back in Winterfell, limping past the stone kings on their thrones. Their grey granite eyes turned to follow him as he passed, and their grey granite fingers tightened on the hilts of the rusted swords upon their laps. You are no Stark, he could hear them mutter, in heavy granite voices. There is no place for you here…I am no Stark, and this is not my place. His crutch slipped and he fell to his knees. The crypts were growing darker. -Jon, ASOS

By contrast, Bran says, “He had never feared the crypts. They were part of his home and who he was, and he had always known one day he would lie here, too.”

(Jon also looks for his father in the crypts, who naturally isn’t there,)

That all the “Starks in Winterfell” (i.e. its’ lords and kings) are physically subsumed into the roots of that “monstrous stone tree” parallels the relationship of greenseers to the weirwood trees. In each case, a humanoid channels the power of a monolith that survives after his death and then absorbs him to add to its collective consciousness and life force. Just as the greenseers eventually go to live into the roots of the weirwood, the Starks are laid to rest with the roots of Winterfell:

The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I’m not dead either.

In fact, the original Builder is strongly evidenced to have been a greenseer, fusing together the roles of sorcerer and king into one single role: The Stark in Winterfell.

Some said the children of the forest helped him build [Storm’s End], shaping the stones with magic; others claimed that a small boy told him what he must do, a boy who would grow to be Bran the Builder. -Catelyn, ACOK

“Bran” is in fact Welsh for “raven” or “crow.” GRRM has stated, “The names in Song of Ice and Fire were something I devoted a fair amount of thought to…” Bloodraven tells Bran as he teaches him to skinchange ravens that:

”It was the Singers who taught the First Men to send messages by raven… but in those days, the birds would speak the words. The trees remember, but men forget, and so now they write the messages on parchment and tie them round the feet of birds who have never shared their skin.”-Bran, ADWD

So far only two individuals have been able to skinchange ravens, and both are greenseers. TWOIAF also says he might have been commissioned to build the Hightower of Oldtown: where ravencraft is now taught (and it should be noted, where a massive weirwood grows). Others suggested it was his son, another Brandon. This confusion could have come about because greenseers use the weirwood trees as a kind of life support in old age, extending their life, thus explaining how the Builder is connected to so many fortresses and structures.

After being subsumed into Winterfell’s heart tree in the deeper and hidden and levels of the caverns, the lowest level of which has not been visited in living memory and might be connected to that mysteriously cold black pool near the heart tree, those of the Builder’s heirs who were not greenseers themselves (and some very likely were) imitated the tradition by entombing themselves in stone as he entombed himself in weirwood.

While the suggestion that “giants” helped Bran the Builder is taken literally, in the same book that tells us this, Tyrion describes the heart tree as a “pale giant frozen in time” and Bran describes the roots of the weirwoods above the Cave as “thick as giants’ legs.” The weirwoods act as repositories of the sorts of magical knowledge necessary to make Winterfell the structure it is:

The singers of the forest had no books. No ink, no parchment, no written language. Instead they had the trees, and the weirwoods above all. When they died, they went into the wood, into leaf and limb and root, and the trees remembered. All their songs and spells, their histories and prayers, everything they knew about this world. Maesters will tell you that the weirwoods are sacred to the old gods. The singers believe they are the old gods. When singers die they become part of that godhood.”-Bran, ADWD

Given the irregular groundwork of the castle, it’s likely that not only did they contribute magic and knowledge, but literal foundation as well. In deference to the Pact, any other weirwoods besides the heart tree in the forest where the castle now stands would not have been burned or pulled up. It was simply build around and on top of them, their huge roots still in the soil, thus explaining why it wasn’t leveled. TWOIAF gives a possible clue to this when it suggests that some maesters believe Winterfell began as a series of linked ringforts; weirwoods groves in the wild are very often seen in circular formations, and so it’s even possibly that the original forts or towers built themselves around and eventually on top of the trees.

Just as the Starks burial practices fuse royal and magical practice, on a meta-textual level it represents the combining of two disparate strands of the mythical British kingship, the Christian King Arthur and the Celtic Bran the Blessed. King Arthur, was according to the legend recounted by Geoffrey of Monmouth to be “mortally wounded; and being carried thence to the Isle of Avallon to be cured of his wounds.” In oral tradition he is entombed there with his sword, (as the Stark lords are), waiting to return to save the realm. Bran says, “Under the ground the king the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained.” Bran the Blessed, after defeating an army of undead with the help of his half-brother is badly wounded as well and asks that his followers take his head back to his seat, where he continued to speak and rule, and so long as his remains were there he promised that the realm would safe from invasion. This will be echoed by Bran’s eventual return to Winterfell to reign as its “cripple king” and fulfill the precept of “There must always be a Stark in Winterfell”. His life will be extended by decades or possibly hundreds of years, much like the legendary kings in the Age of Heroes, but namely the Builder.

In modern Britain, ravens are kept in the tower of London in homage to the legends of both King Arthur and Bran the Blessed, with the belief that they protect the realm.

The Heart Tree and The Holy Grail

One writer participating in a literary analysis of A Clash of Kings wrote that:

“Shamanism tends to have several key aspects related to Bran Stark of Winterfell’s story…[there is] a need for the shaman to undergo an injury or an illness, something that anthropologist Victor Turner labeled the “shamanistic initiatory crisis.”

The image of the sacred grove and the a holy tree as a focal point of worship, the “third-eye”, prophetic dreams and animal shapeshifting, all strongly echo what we know about Celtic druidism and shamanism. As the writer also notes, GRRM draws from various traditions of high fantasy and European myth.

But even the heart tree of Winterfell is also heavily informed by a certain Christian motif: the Holy Grail. An analysis of the weirwood’s nature and function in ASOIAF led the writer to characterize as “god and man, living and dead, self and other, past and future, sacred and demonic, the family tree and the unnatural bastard, the familiar and the alien, the dream and waking reality.”  The words “sacred and demonic” are accurate descriptors of the way in which it combines Celtic pagan and Christian elements.

The way that the Starks relate the Old Gods is similar to that of the Fisher King of Arthurian myth and its monotheistic God. This is shaped by the lack of specific shamanistic ritual in Bran’s narrative. The way that magic is conducted and passed down is very minimalistic, and thus brings little imagery from real-world shamanistic practice. Bran also does not spend his time reading about, learning about, or comparing himself to mythical figures who were exclusively wielders of magic. All of his magic comes from and is in the context of his royal descent and kingship narrative. The stone direwolves in the crypts suggest that the Starks of the passed were very often wargs, and the Builder (as explained above) was a greenseer who used the knowledge and power of the heart tree to create the structure that is the seat of his house. These are the “secrets long forgotten in Winterfell” that Jojen refers too, and as Bloodraven tells Bran, “your blood makes you a greenseer.” His royal blood.

The most defined and elaborate magical ritual we see in Bran’s chapters is one that evokes Christian, not pagan, imagery. When he eats the weirwood paste, and in his visions through the heart tree (which Bloodraven describes as “wearing its skin”), he witnesses a human sacrifice in which he can “taste the blood” just like when he wargs Summer. Bran, as the Fisher King, has eaten the “body of [divinity]”, and drank [its] blood through the Heart Tree, the entity from which he draws both power and the divine mandate to rule. The Fisher King in Arthurian legend was the latest line of keepers of the Grail, just as Bran has inherited the heart tree from his own legendary ancestor.

In real world shamanistic practice, differentiated, unique and named spirits are the deities that are worshipped; they are attached as much to certain river, lakes and mountains as much as to domains of influence such as “war” “wisdom” and the like. They are not necessarily of one mind, or even agree.

The Old Gods have to so far acted in the story on the principle of “out of many, one”, with one will and one goal. Jojen refers to their collective consciousness as “that godhood”.  No particular mountains or rivers are considered the home of unique divines in Westeros; there is only the godswood and the heart tree, the magical communicator through which the Old Gods speak as one. Varamyr’s outer-body experience on the precipice of death seems to give us a glimpse of what it means to go “into the earth … Into the stones, into the trees” as Leaf says,

For a moment it was as if he were inside the weirwood, gazing out through carved red eyes…Then both were gone and he was rising, melting, his spirit borne on some cold wind. He was in the snow and in the clouds, he was a sparrow, a squirrel, an oak. A horned owl flew silently between his trees, hunting a hare; Varamyr was inside the owl, inside the hare, inside the trees. Deep below the frozen ground, earthworms burrowed blindly in the dark, and he was them as well. I am the wood, and everything that’s in it, he thought, exulting. A hundred ravens took to the air, cawing as they felt him pass. A great elk trumpeted, unsettling the children clinging to his back. A sleeping direwolf raised his head to snarl at empty air.

As GRRM once commented on how authorial deception plays into his work, weaving together foreshadowing and contradictory pretense “Fiction has more structure than life does. But we have to hide the structure. We have to hide the writer, I think, and make a story seem like it was true.” The pagan and shamanistic aspects of Bran’s narrative act on a meta-textual level to both conceal Bran as essentially a kingly figure of the Arthurian/Fisher mold to a modern audience and to support him in that function. They are even necessary.

Conclusion

“Grafting”, the literary device by which unlike entities are fused together in body and spirit, acts as a glue that has shaped ASOIAF into the story that it is, but it is most often seen in the story of the Starks. Bran and his relationship with Winterfell and the weirwood trees, all the Starks and their direwolves; these are relationships in which two very different kinds of beings are made one.

Winterfell itself is a grafted entity, in which GRRM has created something utterly unique fusing together different elements of the English fantasy tradition. It is both pagan tree and idealized Camelot, Avalon and Holy Grail, Celtic pagan and Christian.

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Bran, the Blizzard, and the Battle of Ice

How the Battle of Ice will proceed and how it will end is one of the most debated topics right now in the fandom, with speculative theories almost as numerous as their writers. Ser Bartimus’s tale of Brandon the Ice Eyes in ADWD, which is told before Bran’s last chapter and Asha’s chapters about the march to Winterfell, seems to foreshadow, however, how the battle will ultimately end:

When old King Edrick Stark had grown too feeble to defend his realm, the Wolf’s Den was captured by slavers from the Stepstones.

“Then a long cruel winter fell,” said Ser Bartimus. “The White Knife froze hard, and even the firth was icing up. The winds came howling from the north and drove them slavers inside to huddle round their fires, and whilst they warmed themselves the new king come down on them. Brandon Stark this was, Edrick Snowbeard’s great-grandson, him that men called Ice Eyes. He took the Wolf’s Den back, stripped the slavers naked, and gave them to the slaves he’d found chained up in the dungeons.” -Davos, ADWD.

If GRRM simply wanted to confirm blood sacrifice to the Old Gods in Davos’s chapter, Bran’s weirwood visions could have sufficed, or he could have just have had Ser Bartimus describe it in another manner. Instead, GRRM chose to specifically describe a historical event in which the Old Gods sent down a savior-king named Brandon from the north when a long cruel winter fell to retake a castle and were given grisly sacrifice as compensation. Bran’s eyes are deep blue because of his Tully heritage, and eyes of this color are often compared to ice in the narrative.

The winds of winter that heralded the Ice Eyes and were key to his victory are extremely similar to the apparently unnatural blizzard that now surrounds Winterfell, and there is one possible source of this magic we should consider: Jojen’s death, which has been set up as an expected and significant event. I will propose that he is dead, and he has been sacrificed, but not to make the weirwood paste. Instead, it was to craft a spell of stormsinging similar to one used by others in the narrative, such Victarion and Stannis himself, with a particularly northern bent on it. 

The winner of this battle won’t ultimately be Roose or Stannis. Instead it will be a Stark returned as his people’s savior. The next Stark in Winterfell will be the same boy who held the title in AGOT and ACOK, and who is the only one to actually have others refering to him as such on page: Brandon, son of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn.

The Wroth of the Old Gods

The blizzard around Winterfell is implied in Jon’s POV to not be natural:

The snow was falling heavily outside. “Wind’s from the south,” Yarwyck observed. “It’s blowing the snow right up against the Wall. See?” He was right. The switchback stair was buried almost to the first landing, Jon saw, and the wooden doors of the ice cells and storerooms had vanished behind a wall of white.-Jon, ADWD.

The winds of winter customarily come from the North, but this blizzard come from Winterfell, as did those of the Brandon Ice Eyes

The Old Gods also show or strongly suggested in canon to have some power over the wind. Osha says that the Old Gods “whisper” through a breeze. This is exactly what Bran manages to do when he attempts to speak to his father in the past:

“Father.” Bran’s voice was a whisper in the wind, a rustle in the leaves.

This and other pieces of evidences were used in the text to craft a theory that the Storm God of the Ironborn is in fact the Old Gods, and that the Hammer of Waters laid waste the Iron Islands as revenge for destroying a massive grove of weirwoods there (now known as Nagga’s Bones). The Damphair says that “ravens were creatures of the Storm God” and considers the possibly skingchanging Farwynds to be unholy. We learn in ADWD that ravens are in fact the chosen messengers and the second life of the Children and their First Men allies.

The Grey King was said to warm his Hall with the Nagga’s living fire, and fashioned a longship from the white wood of Ygg, a tree that devoured human flesh (that’s definitely weirwood). It would seem that he was burning weirwood, as there’s no other legends of sea monsters in Westeros like Nagga, and the description of Nagga’s Bones closely resembles dead weirwoods. When the Storm God’s wrath comes down on him, it specifically snuffs out that fire. Stannis, before the blizzard begins to decimate his southron soldiers, committed the same hated blasphemy by forcing the Free Folk burn branches of weirwood.

I would propose that the blizzard around Winterfell is a work of magic that serves a multitude of functions: to punish Stannis and the followers of R’hllor for burning weirwood, to slow that army down to give Bran time to return via Gorne’s Way, and to hide that army as it approaches Winterfell.

It’s even directly called a curse sent by the Old Gods by northmen and others who are either outright Stark loyalists at heart, or are of dubious loyalty to Bolton per a certain component of the GNC theory:

“The gods have turned against us,” old Lord Locke was heard to say in the Great Hall. “This is their wroth. A wind as cold as hell itself and snows that never end. We are cursed.”-Theon, ADWD

That was the night that Asha first heard the queen’s men muttering about a sacrifice—an offering to their red god, so he might end the storm. “The gods of the north have unleashed this storm on us,” Ser Corliss Penny said.-Asha, ADWD

What has your southron god to do with snow?” demanded Artos Flint. His black beard was crusted with ice. “This is the wroth of the old gods come upon us. It is them we should appease.”-Asha, ADWD

Notably, this blizzard falls after Bran’s last chapter, and hence Jojen’s disappearance.

Those inside the castle are right to believe that this blizzard is ill-omen for them. The winds of winter were integral to the victory of Ice Eyes, who fell upon the slavers while they were “huddled around their fires”. The blizzard has already blinded those hold up in Winterfell:

“He could be camped five feet from our walls with a hundred thousand men,” said an archer wearing Cerwyn colors. “We’d never see a one o’ them through this storm.”-Theon, ADWD.

“To fight Lord Stannis we would first need to find him,” Roose Ryswell pointed out. “Our scouts go out the Hunter’s Gate, but of late, none of them return.”-Theon, ADWD “Twenty green boys, with spades,” Theon told him. “The snow fell heavily for days. So heavily that you could not see the castle walls ten yards away, no more than the men up on the battlements could see what was happening beyond those walls. So Crowfood set his boys to digging pits outside the castle gates, then blew his horn to lure Lord Bolton out. Instead he got the Freys. The snow had covered up the pits, so they rode right into them. Aenys broke his neck, I heard, but Ser Hosteen only lost a horse, more’s the pity.”-Theon, TWOW

The blizzard has perfectly served the interests of the Stark loyalists, but not exactly Stannis and certainly not the Bolton-Frey alliance. Those same winds have had little effect on the northman that march with Stannis:

The northmen fared much better, with their garrons and their bear-paws. Black Donnel Flint and his half-brother Artos only lost one man between them. The Liddles, the Wulls, and the Norreys lost none at all. One of Morgan Liddle’s mules had gone astray, but he seemed to think the Flints had stolen him.

The southerners looked a sorry lot, Asha thought—gaunt and hollow-cheeked, some pale and sick, others with red and wind-scoured faces. By contrast the northmen seemed hale and healthy, big ruddy men with beards as thick as bushes, clad in fur and iron. They might be cold and hungry too, but the marching had gone easier for them, with their garrons and their bear-paws.

Which brings us to the question of how Jojen’s death fits into this. His future death has been referenced since ACOK. He knows when and how he will die, and it comes up frequently in the narrative. Jojen says, “The gods gave me only greendreams. My task was to get you here. My part in this is done.” His last words in ADWD were, “He’s not the one who needs to be afraid.”

The Hammer of the Waters was said to be created as most powerful magic in ASOIAF is: with blood sacrifice. The Singers are said to either have sacrificed a 1000 human captives or their own children. Victarion practices blood sacrifice to manipulate the weather, and Stannis’s fast journey to the Wall was partly made possibly by unusually good winds after a blood sacrifice.

By weakening Stannis’s southron, R’hllor worshipping army, slowing down its march and at the same time cloaking it with snows, it provides time for Bran to return as the savior of his people as the Ice Eyes was.

Forgotten Ways: Bran, the Cave, and Gorne’s Way

The Mountain Clans and Lord Manderly know that Bran is alive. The Liddle that Bran meets in the mountains, (who might even have been THE Liddle, as he did not reject Jojen calling him “lord”), recognizes Bran for who he is:

“The Bastard’s boys, aye. He was dead, but now he’s not. And paying good silver for wolfskins, a man hears, and maybe gold for word of certain other walking dead.” He looked at Bran when he said that, and at Summer stretched out beside him.

Lord Manderly says that Wex Pyke “drew two boys…and two wolves.”

Jojen’s death is meant to be his final act in furthering Bran’s journey as the Builder’s heir. In life, he guided him to the Cave; in death, he will lead him home.

His route home? Gorne’s Way:

There are hundreds o’ caves in these hills, and down deep they all connect. There’s even a way under your Wall. Gorne’s Way.”-Jon, ASOS

The caves were timeless, vast, silent. They were home to more than three score living singers and the bones of thousands dead, and extended far below the hollow hill. “Men should not go wandering in this place,” Leaf warned them…there are passages that go even deeper, bottomless pits and sudden shafts, forgotten ways that lead to the very center of the earth. Even my people have not explored them all, and we have lived here for a thousand thousand of your man-years.”-Bran, ADWD

It brings to mind a transcription of a wildling song in Maester Herryk’s History of the Kings-Beyond-the-Wall, regarding the brothers Gendel and Gorne. They were called upon to mediate a dispute between a clan of children and a family of giants over the possession of a cavern. Gendel and Gorne, it is said, ultimately resolved the matter through trickery, making both sides disavow any desire for the cavern, after the brothers discovered it was a part of a greater chain of caverns that eventually passed beneath the Wall.-The World of Ice and Fire

It’s certain that the Cave of the Three-Eyed Crow is the very cave that the Singers and the Giants squabbled over, and thus it connects to Gorne’s Way. Just as Gendel ultimately became lost in the caverns, Leaf warns them that they could meet the same fate if they do not know the way. Gorne’s Way may even connect to the very Crypts of Winterfell, as its description mirrors them and the grove of weirwoods above the cave. Bran describes Winterfell “as a monstrous stone tree, its roots sunk deep into the earth” The lowest level of the Crypt has not been visited in living memory, and may be partially collapsed.

So here is my speculative outline for Bran’s chapters in TWOW:

Bran will spend at least one more chapter in the Cave, where (hopefully) we’ll deal with skinchanging Hodor, the origin of the Others and possibly other backstory such as the Tourney of Harrenhall. At the end of the chapter, he will begin his journey through Gorne’s Way.

He will spend at least one chapter traveling though Gorne’s Way, possibly two. (if there’s any reality to the story of Gendel’s Children, this one will take the horror aspects of Bran’s story to their darkest extent).

After the Battle on the Ice (i.e. Long Lake) is concluded with Stannis gaining an incomplete victory, the Mountain Clans will still be trapped outside the walls. Bran will emerge through Gorne’s Way in the crypts or near the Walls and use his knowledge of Winterfell’s architecture from his days a climber, his power over ravens and Summer to lead the Stark loyalists in a lopsided and bloody battle against the Botlon’s alliance, including the Ryswells and Dustins if Lady Barbary truly does stay loyal to Roose.

Before the conclusion of TWOW, Bran will begin to ready Winterfell for the defense against the Others through knowledge of its construction and magic (”the trees will teach you” as Leaf says) and Arya will either arrive and be close to arriving with Nymeria and her pack.

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Bran and the Caves of Gendel and Gorne

When Bran arrives in the Cave he is told by Leaf not explore the Caves:

“Men should not go wandering in this place,” Leaf warned them. “The river you hear is swift and black, and flows down and down to a sunless sea. And there are passages that go even deeper, bottomless pits and sudden shafts, forgotten ways that lead to the very center of the earth. Even my people have not explored them all, and we have lived here for a thousand thousand of your man-years.”

Reading this, one can’t help but think of the caves of Gendel and Gorne, a story related to us in the very same book that Bran passes through the Wall, told by Ygritte to Jon:

“There are hundreds o’ caves in these hills and down deep they all connect. There’s even a way under your Wall. Gorne’s Way.”

“Gorne,” said Jon, “Gorne was King-beyond-the-Wall.”

“Aye,” said, Ygritte, “Together with his brother Gendel, three thousand years ago. They led o’ host of free folk through the caves…”

“Gendel did not die. He cut his way free, through the crows and led his people back north with the wolves howling at their heels. Only Gendel not know the Caves, as Gorne had, and took a wrong turn….Deeper and deeper he went, and when he tried t’ turn back the ways that seemed familiar ended in stone rather than sky…Gendel’s folk were never seen again.”

This reinforced in the world by the statement that in fact, the Nights Watch never joined the battle. They were late, and ordered to bury the dead by the King in the North.

It is very likely that the cave Bran is currently living in is a part of this system, and that in turn, it connects to Gorne’s Way. GRRM has told us this story for a reason, and that reason is interwoven toto Bran’s character arc and status as an heir to the Builder.

TWOIAF also lends credence to the connection:

It brings to mind a transcription of a wildling song in Maester Herryk’s History of the Kings-Beyond-the-Wall, regarding the brothers Gendel and Gorne. They were called upon to mediate a dispute between a clan of children and a family of giants over the possession of a cavern. Gendel and Gorne, it is said, ultimately resolved the matter through trickery, making both sides disavow any desire for the cavern, after the brothers discovered it was a part of a greater chain of caverns that eventually passed beneath the Wall.

Also, consider the Leaf’s statement that even she does not know where they call go: That is a very suspicious one. In fact, but it can also be read as a deliberate attempt to keep Bran, for the time being, from possibly stumbling upon Gorne’s Way. They have lived there for a “thousand thousand of your man-years”: if anyone knows where Gorne’s Way is, the Singers do.

Why try to keep Bran from exploring the tunnels and possibly getting lost or finding Gorne’s way in the skin of a raven? Because he wants to go home, desperately. When he is told warg the tree above him by Brynden, he instead reaches out for Winterfell’s heart tree:

“Your heart yearns for your father and your home, so that is what you saw.”

-when If he is to learn greenseeing, that obviously can’t occur for the time being. But I believe that GRRM has created a means for Bran and whoever of his companions are still alive to travel back to Winterfell in TWOW

There is also possible foreshadowing in ADWD:

When old King Edrick Stark had grown too feeble to defend his realm, the Wolf’s Den was captured by slavers from the Stepstones.

“Then a long cruel winter fell,” said Ser Bartimus. “The White Knife froze hard, and even the firth was icing up. The winds came howling from the north and drove them slavers inside to huddle round their fires, and whilst they warmed themselves the new king come down on them. Brandon Stark this was, Edrick Snowbeard’s great-grandson, him that men called Ice Eyes. He took the Wolf’s Den back, stripped the slavers naked, and gave them to the slaves he’d found chained up in the dungeons.”

Jon Snow notes that blizzard falling on Stannis’s army comes from the south, from Winterfell itself. Our Bran’s eyes are deep blue, and eyes of that color are in the narrative described as being like ice.

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“A Time For Beasts”: Bran, Arya and the Long Night

In the eerie aftermath of the Storm of Swords, the assassinations of Joffrey, Robb and Balon, and the Red Wedding, Jaime Lannister pauses to reflect on the shambles that the War of the Five Kings has left Westeros, and thinks back to when he first became a knight:

The world was simpler in those days, Jaime thought, and men as well as swords were made of finer steel. They were all in their graves now… And me, that boy I was … when did he die, I wonder? That boy had wanted to be Ser Arthur Dayne, but someplace along the way he had become the Smiling Knight instead.-Jaime, ASOS

Jaime’s mental and physical condition and his maiming most of all symbolize the state of southron knighthood and its civilization as a whole: morally bankrupt, top-heavy, extravagantly wasteful, more arrogantly cruel than gallant, and depleted from civil war. The armed forces that have survived and thrived are guerrillas, asymmetrical and at most indifferent to chivalric form, including The Brotherhood Without Banners, the Crannog dwellers, the Mountain Clans of the North and Vale, the Skagosi, and the Dornish.

As Jaime proceeds through the Riverlands, bringing to a close the sieges of Riverrun and Raventree Hall, he notes in displeasure the utter lawless state of the realm. It is in response to the chaotic times that he thinks:

“This is a time for beasts: for lions and wolves and angry dogs, ravens and carrion crows.”-Jaime, AFFC

That will turn out to be more true than he knows. The decline of the (human) knight and the rise of the wolf and the raven is crystalized in Bran and Arya’s stories; as the they turn away from the songs of the knightly heroes of the past, they are drawn to another that is in fact much older: The howling of wolves. Those howls herald a new age “for gods and heroes”, and their heavily foreshadowed return to Winterfell as the saviors of their people. Battles will literally be fought and won by the wolf and its companion guide the raven. Bran and Arya reflect this in their very names (literally “raven” and for her, “pure and noble” like the wolf). They will have command of the North’s few defenses against the invasion of the Others and their wights, forces whose magical qualities are antithetical to the knight and his values: the walls of Winterfell, the murders of ravens, and Nymeria’s massive wolf pack.

“Singing in a Language He Had Once known”

“Some nights the wolf dreams were so vivid that she could hear her brothers howling even as she woke”

Bran and Arya’s fortunes in ACOK grow increasingly bleak, as Arya faces starvation, enslavement, atrocity and violence, and Bran has take on the responsibility of being lord of Winterfell, accept his paralysis, and then his own harrowing journey of deprivation Beyond the Wall. In their disillusionment, they forget the songs of knighthood and chivalry, and instead are spellbound by another: the howling of wolves.

When Bran and Arya talk about the image of the wolf, and to draw courage from it by affirming their identities as a wolf, they set it in direct opposition to what they are. The wolf is what they aspire to be. All around them humans are revealed to be evil or weak; either a pitiless murderer like Gregor Clegane, or murdered themselves, like their beloved mother and father.

By contrast, the wolf, whether in a warging dream or actively skinchanging it, is both noble and powerful. For Arya specifically, the “Night Wolf” has the loyal pack she longs for, and for Bran, he is drawn to skinchange Summer because he can do what Bran cannot: “run and fight and hear and smell.“ As they begin to fuse with their respective wolves in mind, they become more and more fused with them in spirit as well, and even body. One body feels the sensations of the other.

GRRM first conceived of ASOIAF from an image of a group of children finding direwolves in the snow. And from the beginning, it is strongly hinted that the Old Gods gave the Stark children the direwolves as gifts, with a male pup for every boy and female pup for every girl. Jon Snow, not yet knowing he was meant to have one as well, “They were meant to have them.” A direwolf had not been spotted south of the Wall in hundreds of years, and yet six pups were found by the Stark children. That is not an accident. But something more would be needed to force Bran and Arya to be more ready to embrace their warg connections.

For Bran, this begins with the paralyzing of his legs. In the aftermath of the fall from the tower, he is in deep depression. Bran had once wanted to be a member of the kingsguard, that pinnacle of chivalric knighthood:

Bran was going to be a knight himself someday, one of the Kingsguard… Bran knew all the stories. Their names were like music to him. Serwyn of the Mirror Shield. Ser Ryam Redwyne. Prince Aemon the Dragonknight. The twins Ser Erryk and Ser Arryk…The White Bull, Gerold Hightower. Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. Barristan the Bold.-Bran, AGOT

Notice here the reference to “music”; he thinks that the very names of his heroes are beautiful and awe-inspiring like a song. After his fall, Bran knows that that is now all out of reach. He will never be a knight in the songs and stories that he once loved:

“A year ago, before, he would have visited the town even if it meant climbing over the walls by himself. In those days he could run down stairs, get on and off his pony by himself, and wield a wooden sword good enough to knock Prince Tommen in the dirt.“

He is not able to joust or defend himself, and thus unable to live up to chivalry’s masculine ideals. He is “helpless as a baby.” Bran feels emasculated and infantilized by his disability. And nearly immediately, the wolf dreams begin, and he begins to hear the dark, sad and savage howls of wolves:

“He loved to listen to the direwolves sing to the stars. Of late, he often dreamed of wolves. They are talking to me, brother to brother, he told himself when the direwolves howled. He could almost understand them.. not quite, not truly, but almost… as if they were singing in a language he had once known and somehow forgotten.-Bran, ACOK

Once Arya’s journey from King’s Landing begins, she has seen her father murdered and must flee for her life, she too hears the call, and knows that it is directed at her, that the wolves want her to answer.

She could hear the sound of her own breath, and the wolves as well, a great pack of them now. They are closer than the one I heard in the godswood, she thought. They are calling to me.- Arya, ACOK

From the outset, the song of the wolf seems to awaken something in them. As Bran lay in his coma, Summer stood outside his window and howled constantly, which disturbed his mother but Robb, a warg himself affirmed, “He needs to hear them sing,” that it might somehow help him heal.  Bran identifies this song as having been “forgotten”; it is from deep, deep in the past, perhaps from when humanity lived, as the crannogmen would say, “closer the green.” When the wolves howl, they feel compelled to answer:

"Oooo,” Bran cried tentatively. He cupped his hands around his mouth and lifted his head to the comet. “Ooooooooooooooooooo, ahooooooooooooooo,” he howled. It sounded stupid, high and hollow and quavering, a little boy’s howl, not a wolf’s. Yet Summer gave answer, his deep voice drowning out Bran’s thin one, and Shaggydog made it a chorus. Bran haroooed again. They howled together, last of their pack.-Bran, ACOK

When she looked again she realized they were only a pack of wolves. She cupped her hands around her mouth and howled down at them, “Ahooooooooo, ahooooooooo.” When the largest of the wolves lifted its head and howled back, the sound made Arya shiver.- Arya, ASOS

-And while warging, Arya consistently calls the other wolves her “brothers”, “sisters”, and occasionally “little cousins” as well.

In Arya’s case, with no one like Jojen to guide in her exploring her warg connection, her dreams are her primary connection, and even as of ADWD does not seem to understand that the “night wolf” is Nymeria. But they are incredibly intense, she is able to act with purpose, and just like her brother, she begins to feel the same physical sensations of the direwolf: sounds, smells, tastes. However, she seems to exhibit control and act with purpose, as when Nymeria goes in search of Catelyn’s body in the river:

That night she went to sleep thinking of her mother, and wondering if she should kill the Hound in his sleep and rescue Lady Catelyn herself. When she closed her eyes she saw her mother’s face against the back of her eyelids. She’s so close I could almost smell her… …and then she could smell her. The scent was faint beneath the other smells… one of her sisters had snapped at one as it took flight and caught it by the wing. It made her want a crow herself. She wanted to taste the blood, to hear the bones crunch between her teeth, to fill her belly with warm flesh instead of cold. She was hungry and the meat was all around, but she knew she could not eat.

She deliberately avoids eating to do what her human half wants. Bran even while being trained, at first lacks that level of control. Even remembering to mark a tree or bring some food back for them is hard to do.

As they are bonded in mind, they are truly set on the path of being, as Jojen describes it, “Two and one”: two bodies, one soul, and the soul makes little distinction between the sensation of one body and another:

Somewhere far off she heard a wolf howling. It wasn’t very loud compared to the camp noise and the music and the low ominous growl of the river running wild, but she heard it all the same. Only maybe it wasn’t her ears that heard it.-Arya, ASOS

When Arya has warging dreams, she often acts in her human body what she does in her wolf, as in AFFC: “Once Brea had claimed that she was growling in her sleep as she thrashed beneath the covers. She thought that was some stupid lie till Talea said it too.“

When Summer smells meat, Bran’s mouth waters:

I am him, and he is me. He feels what I feel. Sometimes Bran could sense the direwolf sniffing after the elk, wondering if he could bring the great beast down. Summer had grown accustomed to horses at Winterfell, but this was an elk and elk were prey. The direwolf could sense the warm blood coursing beneath the elk’s shaggy hide. Just the smell was enough to make the slaver run from between his jaws, and when it did Bran’s mouth would water at the thought of rich, dark meat.-Bran, ADWD

It is during this time that Bran and his companions are facing lethal cold and near starvation. He is being to reduced to an animalistic state of deprivation, and because of this what the boy feels is all too similar to what the wolf feels, making the distinctions even blurrier. Arya’s warging dreams first come to her during her hungry and frightening journey in the Riverlands.

Bran is motivated to accept the bond of the wolf because the paralysis that has made him feel weak and worthless:

He remembered who he was all too well; Bran the boy, Bran the broken. Better Bran the beastling.

But Summer is different, Summer is “strong and swift and fierce” and in ADWD he fights an alpha wolf for control of the pack, and wins:

Then the two rushed together, wolf and direwolf, and there was no more time for thought. The world shrank down to tooth and claw, snow flying as they rolled and spun and tore at one another… But finally the old one-eyed wolf lay down and showed his belly. The direwolf snapped at him twice more, sniffed at his butt, then lifted a leg over him.

A few snaps and a warning growl, and the female and the tail submitted too. The pack was his.-Bran, ADWD

Arya’s soul reaches out for her other half because it has exactly that: Nymeria is a mighty leader and has a loyal pack:

The wolf dreams were the good ones. In the wolf dreams she was swift and strong, running down her prey with her pack at her heels.-Arya, AFFC

“They say the pack is led by a monstrous she-wolf, a stalking shadow grim and grey and huge…no trap nor snare can hold her, that she fears neither steel nor fire, slays any wolf that tries to mount her, and devours no other flesh but man.” Brienne, AFFC

This pack is “fierce and terrible and hers.” They act effectively, as a replacement for her siblings, and while warging she consistently calls the wolves her “brothers” and “sisters”, and Nymeria seems to identify Catelyn as her mother as much as Arya does:

The white thing lay facedown in the mud, her dead flesh wrinkled and pale, cold blood trickling from her throat. Rise, she thought. Rise and eat and run with us.

When Arya is in her darkest, saddest moments, she says, “I have no pack. They had killed her pack.” Abandonment, and her desperate attempts to avoid loneliness, is what drives her to commit her most heroic actions, and it is what draws to her the wolf.

The wolf and its songs are a primordial and pre-human image. It is notable that the Children of the Forest do not call themselves by that name. They call themselves, “Those who sing the song of earth.” By being older and more ancient than the songs of chivalry, those of the wolf and the earth are by definition more authentic, more “real.” When chivalric gallantry is revealed to be hypocritical, useless to them in their hour of need, wolf and its howls are proven stronger, more real and loving, to the point that they are even saved by their direwolves, such as when Nymeria hunts and kills the Brave Companions sent after Arya. Bran and Arya both have affectionate relationships with their wolves, often involving roughhousing:

Arya made a face and hugged the wolfling tight. Nymeria licked her ear, and she giggled.-Arya, AGOT

The wolf bowled into him. He clung with all his strength as the wolf dragged him bumping through the grass. They wrestled and rolled and clung to each other, one snarling and yapping, the other laughing. In the end it was Bran sprawled on top, the mud-spattered direwolf under him. “Good wolf,” he panted. Summer licked him across the ear.

Meera shook her head. “Does he never grow angry?”

“Not with me.” Bran grabbed the wolf by his ears and Summer snapped at him fiercely, but it was all in play. “Sometimes he tears my garb but he’s never drawn blood.”-Bran, ACOK

“The World Turned Upside Down”: Arya and the Moon

Once Bran is in the Cave and lives in perpetual night, like the wolf, the moon is primary way to keep track of time. It is the only way he keeps track of time. But the moon is present in Arya’s story very early on, and it’s presence in her story is a good deal of what defines her has ASOIAF’s purest incarnation of a werewolf: a simple girl in the sunlight, but a wolf in the moonlight.

Arya uses the moon to do more than keep track of time: the moon is her guide in both her human skin and her wolf skin. The moon is also a deeply feminine symbol, both because its association with the menstrual cycle, but also because its mythological role as a counterpart to the sun, which is usually male. The absence of the one from the sky invariably brings the rise of the other.

The closely associated images of night and death, are also explicitly feminine in many parts of the world as well. One historian of the deeply and violently patriarchal Russian peasantry noted this strange duality in their culture:

“Russian peasants identify death with women. The Psalter readers, body washers and mourners were often women, death was represented in Russian folklore as a woman with a scythe, and the Russian word for death, ‘smert’, is feminine. She argued that this ‘represented the real world turned upside down. While on earth the patriarchy controlled and subordinated women, in the world beyond women were in control and took their revenge on the patriarchy by snuffing out life.’”

In the “Long Night” that is falling on Westeros, and in every night that falls in the Riverlands, it is Arya and her wolf pack that rule the forests. It is the world of Jaime Lannister, Barristan Selmy and Arthur Dayne, with their Sword of the Morning and bright armor, “turned upside down.” It is not just a matter of the fall of the sun and rise of the moon, but in fact carries over to a change of power, military and magical, across the whole landscape of Westeros. Beasts have the upper hand on humanity; woman over man:

“I heard the same thing from my cousin, and she’s not the sort to lie,” an old woman said. “She says there’s this great pack, hundreds of them, mankillers. The one that leads them is a she-wolf, a bitch from the seventh hell.” Arya, ACoK

“It’s been a bad year for wolves,” volunteered a sallow man in a travel stained green cloak. “Around the Gods Eye, the packs have grown bolder’n anyone can remember. Sheep, cows, dogs, makes no matter, they kill as they like, and they got no fear of men. It’s worth your life to go into those woods by night.”- Arya, ACOK

“Wolves. Hundreds of the bloody beggars.” He’d lost two sentries to them. The wolves had come out of the dark to savage them. “Armed men in mail and boiled leather, and yet the beasts had no fear of them. Before he died, Jate said the pack was led by a she-wolf of monstrous size. A direwolf, to hear him tell it. The wolves got in amongst our horse lines too. The bloody bastards killed my favorite bay.” Jaime, AFFC

Nymeria and her pack are known to strike at night, and never attack bands of enemies that are too large.

Arya has yet to reunite with Nymeria, so the role of the moon has yet to reach its full potential in her story, but what we do have is very suggestive:

They ran down a frightened horse together, tore its throat out, and feasted. And when the moon broke through the clouds, she threw back her head and howled.-Arya, ACOK

Their armor glinted pale in the moonlight, and she saw a pair of striped black-and-white zorses. The Bloody Mummers. Arya withdrew a little deeper into the shadows, and watched as a huge black bear rolled by, caged in the back of a wagon.-Arya, ACOK

Her nights were lit by distant stars and the shimmer of moonlight on snow, but every dawn she woke to darkness.-Arya, ASOS

Before the night was done, her wits were wandering. Standing there with the flagon in her hands, she dreamed she was a wolf, running free through a forest with a great pack howling at her heels.-Arya, ASOS

Arya is always able to see clearly in the moonlight; be it prey, enemy, or both.

“Whilst They Huddled Around their Fires, The New King Come Down on Them“: Bran and the Raven

Bran’s own assent coming assent to power and return to Winterfell as a its rightful lord also represents an upending of the order as the northern bannermen understand it. ADWD gave us a tantalizing and highly suggestive bit of foreshadowing:

When old King Edrick Stark had grown too feeble to defend his realm, the Wolf’s Den was captured by slavers from the Stepstones.

“Then a long cruel winter fell,” said Ser Bartimus. “The White Knife froze hard, and even the firth was icing up. The winds came howling from the north and drove them slavers inside to huddle round their fires, and whilst they warmed themselves the new king come down on them. Brandon Stark this was, Edrick Snowbeard’s great-grandson, him that men called Ice Eyes. He took the Wolf’s Den back, stripped the slavers naked, and gave them to the slaves he’d found chained up in the dungeons.”-Davos, ADWD

This passages has a purpose beyond just giving us an example of human sacrifice. Bran’s weirwood visions would have sufficed for that purpose, or GRRM could have just have described another kind of scene of human sacrifice.

Instead, we have a historical event where the Old Gods sent down from the savior-king from the north to retake a castle his predecessor had lost because of weakness, and whose name was Brandon. Not only did this happen when a cruel “winter fell”, but the name “Ice Eyes” connects this king to our Bran. Bran, because of his Tully appearance, has bright blue eyes, and eyes of this color are often said in the narrative to look like ice.

That Bran should come to Winterfell through Gorne’s Way, and use his magic to rally the Stark loyalists against the Boltons and the coming Other invasion in the siege it was designed to withstand, is both ironic and appropriate. It was their insolent whispers and stares about the “green cripple boy” that first led Bran to give himself the name “Bran the Broken”:

Harrion Karstark, the oldest of Lord Rickard’s sons, bowed, and his brothers after him, yet as they settled back in their places he heard the younger two talking in low voices, over the clatter of wine cups. I’ll… sooner die than live like that,” muttered one, his father’s namesake Eddard, and his brother Torrhen said likely the boy was broken inside as well as out, too craven to take his own life.

Broken, Bran thought bitterly as he clutched his knife. Is that what he was now? Bran the Broken?-Bran, AGOT

His own bannermen say that he should commit suicide rather than live with his disability, and it is perhaps rather apt that with winter coming, Bloodraven tells Bran to “fly or die.”

Bran was always given the place of honor at his brother’s right hand. Some of the lords bannermen gave him queer hard stares as he sat there, as if they wondered by what right a green boy should be placed above them, and him a cripple too.-Bran, AGOT

Not only will Bran sit above them; he’s going to rule them. A little girl is going to be leading them in war, and a cripple is going to be their king. That is the world turned upside down. This irony was intended by GRRM from the very beginning, to subvert the that truly great kings must be able-bodied and be able to ride out into battle with his men:

Bran is the first viewpoint character. In the back of their heads, people are thinking Bran is the hero of the story. He’s young King Arthur. We’re going to follow this young boy–and then, boom: You don’t expect something like that to happen to him. So that was successful [laughs].

The other kingly figures we see, such as Renly, Robert, Stannis, Viserys, Aerys are not given the same legitimacy, or likely success, by the narrative. Bran is the only ruler we see sincerely deal with the mundane essentials of food storage/supply, castle repairs, harvests, and hearing his subjects’ basic needs on page.

It’s become clear as well that knights, and their heavily armored northern equivalents, do not have the advantage in this war. During Stannis’s march on Winterfell, the southron knights and their destiers, with their heavy armor and lack of warm clothes, die off the quickest. Of the Stark loyalists that remain, irregulars and guerrillas are overly represented: the Mountain Clans, the Crannog dwellers, and possibly the Skagosi.

And so if Arya’s natural direction is to go home, to the North, what of her pack. If it joined her (and it’s hard to justify her leaving Nymeria and hence the pack behind), why go North where there is even less animal game such as deer and hares? There are many possibilities, but let’s take stock of what likely does seem to be in that direction, or soon will be:

Bran, possibly approaching or already in Winterfell.

Leading BwB and other survivors north to the safety of its walls (in this sense, Arya would also imitate the Nymeria myth).

A lot of prey or meat to scavenge: both the dead from the coming Battle of Ice, and the invasion of the wights,

In the absence of fire to burn them, or wood for flaming arrows, wights are best combated by having something eat them. Bran/Summer and his pack notably were willing and able to take down an wighted snow bear and eat it. I would hypothesize this: Nymeria and her pack are apparently being set up wight-eating army, roving the land in search of the undead. This is not an army assisted by beasts, but instead one made up almost entirely of them, able to walk over the snow and survive the brutal cold where humans cannot.

Of course, how will they be able to find the largest packs of wights in unfamiliar territory? in the real world, the wolves are known to have a symbiotic and even friendly relationship with another animal that guides them prey in exchange for picking the leavings: the raven. We see ravens and crows frequently in the narrative eating corpses made by the war.

Bran has already often skinchanged ravens and watched over Summer hunting with his pack:

[Summer] went outside to join his pack and hunt. Bran did not oft range with them in those days, but some nights he watched them from above. Flying was even better than climbing.

In fact, the raven is often called “the wolf’s bird” because of their close association. When Jaime spoke of the times of being one for beasts, he also specifically mentioned, “ravens and carrion crows.”

And what does Bran’s name mean in Welsh? “Raven.”

The raven in Celtic mythology is often seen on battlefields, the chosen form of different gods or goddesses but especially those of war and wisdom, and serving several different functions, including enchanting warriors, heralding death, or sewing chaos in confusion to the benefit of the side that they favor. Ravens have already performed this function in ASOIAF, as when a whole murder of them rescued Sam and Gilly from a wight by literally mobbing and eating it. A raven called Jon Snow’s name during his election to Lord Commander, and ravens constantly shadow Stannis and his army. The Battle for the Dawn as happening in North will not have huge human armies facing off in the open field against the Others and their wights, but instead huge murders of ravens and packs of wolves with a few humans leading them with Valyrian steel and obsidian blades.

The raven also has connections to ancient monarchy in Britain. Bran the Blessed, with whose epic story includes defeating an army of undead with the help of his half-brother, asked that his disembodied head be brought back to the Britain where it continued to speak and give commands to his subjects. So as long as Bran the Blessed remained there, the realm would be safe from invasion (”There must always be a Stark in Winterfell”). Ravens are still kept in the Tower of London as a part of this cultural superstition. “Bran” is a shared name among different mythic god-kings in Celtic legend.

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The Princes of the Lost Kingdoms

Goddamn I love everything about this gifset.

I love that it uses quotes from the books word-for-word, and how well they match. I love the succinctness and beauty of the theme.

When I look at the experience of exile and trauma that Bran and Theon share, I can’t also help but think of a quote i read recently (which isn’t Hemingway’s btw).

We are all broken; that’s how the light gets in.

What makes Bran and Theon different from other princely heirs is that they have massive trauma done to their bodies and minds. Between the two of them, they endure everything from starvation to physical torture to near-violent death, and in Theon’s case also sexual assault, leaving them depressed and even suicidal:

“[Bran] heard the younger two talking in low voices, over the clatter of wine cups. ‘I’ll… sooner die than live like that,’ muttered one, his father’s namesake Eddard, and his brother Torrhen said likely the boy was broken inside as well as out, too craven to take his own life.

Broken, Bran thought bitterly as he clutched his knife. Is that what he was now? Bran the Broken?”-Bran, AGOT

“And Robb. Robb who had been more a brother to Theon than any son born of Balon Greyjoy’s loins. Murdered at the Red Wedding, butchered by the Freys. I should have been with him. Where was I? I should have died with him.”-Theon, ADWD

Their understanding of the world and their place in it is shattered. Their traumatic experiences also make room, so to speak, for the voice and influence of the divine.

Their pain also resonates because it reflects the pain of their people, and just as the North and the Iron Islands feel totally crushed and subjugated, Bran and Theon feel that their “brokenness” is also their disinheritance, their exile robbing them of their princely status:

“We are ironborn, he thought, with a sudden flash of pride, and for half a heartbeat he was a prince again, Lord Balon’s son, the blood of Pyke. Even thinking was dangerous, though.”-Theon, ADWD

“That was back when he was whole, when he could grasp a sword hilt as well as any man.”-Theon, ADWD

“The stone is strong. Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I’m not dead either.”-Bran, ACOK

“What was he now? Only Bran the broken boy, Brandon of House Stark, prince of a lost kingdom, lord of a burned castle, heir to ruins.”-Bran, ADWD

And so, Bran and Theon’s healing can only truly happen if they are restored as princes, if they live once again, even if only briefly, as Prince Brandon of House Stark and Prince Theon of House Greyjoy. Bran’s sense of brokenness is bound up with the North and Winterfell’s ruination, while Theon’s was made possible by the same mistake that has brought the Ironborn so much grief: trying to be conquerors of land that was too far from the sea. Thus, their healing will inevitably be a moment of healing for their people, and what is the salvation of one must also be the salvation of the other.

And so, what will heal the princes and also save their kingdoms?

The very thing that Bran and Theon’s ancestors used build them in the first place: magic from the divines. That will mean having a religious experience, a spiritual awakening. Both princes have already been built up to that point.

Bran had always liked the godswood, even before, but of late he found himself drawn to it more and more. Even the heart tree no longer scared him the way it used to. The deep red eyes carved into the pale trunk still watched him, yet somehow he took comfort from that now. The gods were looking over him, he told himself; the old gods, gods of the Starks and the First Men and the children of the forest, his father’s gods. He felt safe in their sight, and the deep silence of the trees helped him think. Bran had been thinking a lot since his fall; thinking, and dreaming, and talking with the gods. -Bran, ACOK

The night was windless, the snow drifting straight down out of a cold black sky, yet the leaves of the heart tree were rustling his name. “Theon,” they seemed to whisper, “Theon.”

The old gods, he thought. They know me. They know my name. I was Theon of House Greyjoy. I was a ward of Eddard Stark, a friend and brother to his children. “Please.” He fell to his knees. “A sword, that’s all I ask. Let me die as Theon, not as Reek.” Tears trickled down his cheeks, impossibly warm. “I was ironborn. A son … a son of Pyke, of the islands.”-Theon, ADWD

For Bran and Theon to have intense spiritual experiences with the Old Gods and the Drowned God respectively and to be radically changed by them is in their family histories. Theon’s uncle the Damphair also used to be a heavy-drinking, womanizing and self-centered joker, was also sexually abused, but

Aeron had drowned and been reborn from the sea, [as] the god’s own prophet.-Aeron, AFFC

To resolve his identity crisis, caught between his Ironborn heritage and his brotherhood with the Robb Stark, Theon will have to forgive himself for betraying his brother and accept that he was their brother, but not anymore. Winterfell is not his home, nor are the Old Gods his gods. Theon Greyjoy is dead, but “what is dead may never die but rises again, harder, stronger.”

Bran is caught up in a complex web of animal and wolf imagery, but also of the tree, so we can very much imagine what happens to Bran and Winterfell as the “regrowing the tree from the roots.” His maiming gives him vision from his Third-Eye and the time to think and reflect, and that allows him to see and understand the “secrets long forgotten in Winterfell” that others do not. His ancestor the Builder used greenseeing and the weirwoods to save his people, and it’s likely Ice Eyes was also helped by the Old Gods when he rescued captured northerners from slavery.

Bran is in particular agony because he at present cannot do those things. He echoes Luwin’s teachings in ACOK: ”A good lord protects his people.” So it is with a sense of having totally failed as a person when he calls himself, “’The Prince of Winterfell.’ Of Winterfell burned and tumbled, its people scattered and slain,” and wonders in despair, “How can you be the prince of someplace you might never see again?”(ASOS). This only gets worse in ADWD as he realizes that the Reeds are suffering for him, and that Jojen will likely die because he helped bring Bran to the Cave.

With their identities based as much on their place as princes as on pain and magic, I find the ideas that Theon is supposed to die in TWOW and Bran to stay in the Cave forever to be non-sequiturs. They don’t have catharsis, and they don’t bring comfort or healing; it just pushes them under a rug.

When I read the suffering they go through which even the gods seem accept as natural and necessary, I also can’t help but think of the words of Kahlil Gibran:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

Bran’s final drink of the bitter potion is his last vision in ADWD. We don’t see his reaction after he “tastes the blood”, but it must have been a moment of searing horror. Once he does, however, for the first time he is called “Brandon” by the narrator and is not the “broken boy”, not anymore. Theon’s moment of agonizing rebirth will come when he drowns in the freezing waters of Long Lake, a nod to the fact he is both Ironborn and a foster brother the the King in the North.

The only thing left to do will be to finally go home.

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Of Dragons and Trees: The Final ADWD Chapters of ASOIAF’s Most Magical Monarchs

ADWD is not the favorite, or even second or third favorite, book for a large part of the fandom. It does however have some of its finest prose and chapters; Theon, Bran, and Arya, especially.

A line from Bran’s last chapter, in particular, struck me:

You have to wake, he would tell himself, you have to wake right now, or you’ll go dreaming into death.

Bran’s final ADWD chapter is intensely dreamlike, with time flowing past, and moving to past, present, and future with little distinction. Even more, it’s something that connects him to ASOIAF’s other most magically infused character; Dany. Her own final chapter is defined by visions,. She muses that,

If I stay here, I will die. I may be dying now.

When she closed her eyes at last, Dany did not know whether she would be strong enough to open them again.

She dreamt of her dead brother.

What follows is a series of intense and symbolic hallucinations.

Each reaches a moment where they go as far from the human world and into the magical as they have ever gone, and will likely go, and each confronts and ultimately accepts the legacy that their monarchical ancestors have left them.

Their journeys, one upward flight toward the light, and the other a descent into darkness, mirror each other. One accepts (for better or worse), that “dragons plant no trees”, and like her ancestor Aegon the Conqueror and the Valyrians, she must forge her destiny through war. The other is told that he must regrow his identity, and his home, from the roots, from dark places both literal and emotional: “Never fear the darkness, Bran. The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother’s milk. Darkness will make you strong.” In his vision of the sacrifice to weirwood, he sees how that “monstrous stone tree” (Winterfell) was grown.

Fire and Earth: The Conqueror and the Builder

The legendary monarchs of the past, even though their names are rarely spoken, dominate the background of Dany and Bran’s narrative, much like the mythological and fantasy material that GRRM draws from an author to structure his writing. For these two POV’s, it is their ancestors Aegon the Conqueror and Brandon the Builder. Each struggles throughout their chapters with the intensely magical legacy left to them through a long, hallucinatory journey of revelatory visions and because of that abandon the remnants of their childhood selves, and childhood desires in their final chapter of ADWD.

Indeed, their ancestors’ approach to creating their realms is embodied in elements they are closely associated with, the monoliths they left behind, the magical creatures that aided them and in their very names.

Aegon, of course, did not create a realm of his own: he conquered it, and in a single, swift wave of violence akin to fire, forged the 7 kingdoms into one, a process symbolized by his signature creation, the Iron Throne. The swords of enemies were melted together by dragonfire as much as his dominion was.

Because of its role in creative destruction, fire is also the element of change and idealism, destroying old orders to create new ones. For this reason, fire and the dragons (“fire made flesh”) appeal have to Dany in ways that she would rather not admit. In her heart, she wishes to completely wipe away slavery and the slaveowners and build an utterly new world, which seems only possible with massive violence:

Aegon the Conqueror brought fire and blood to Westeros, but afterward he gave them peace, prosperity, and justice.-Dany, ASOS

I hate this, thought Daenerys Targaryen. How did this happen, that I am drinking and smiling with men I’d sooner flay? … This is peace, she told herself. This is what I wanted, what I worked for, this is why I married Hizdahr. So why does it taste so much like defeat?-Dany, ADWD

Dany’s life has many suggestive parallels to her ancestor Aegon I; each is a dragonrider, each comes (or will come) to Westeros as a conqueror, and he desires to radically reshape Westeros as a way of reclaiming a lost legacy. In his case, he appears to have been trying to imitate in some way the Valyrian Freehold, but in Dany’s case it is to imitate him.

By contrast, the Builder and his heirs built the Stark realm steadily and gradually over the centuries in a process symbolized by Winterfell and its heart tree’s growth:

The place had grown over the centuries like some monstrous stone tree, Maester Luwin told him once, and its branches were gnarled and thick and twisted, its roots sunk deep into the earth. -Bran, AGOT

The [heart] tree itself was shrinking, growing smaller with each vision, whilst the lesser trees dwindled into saplings and vanished, only to be replaced by other trees that would dwindle and vanish in their turn.-Bran, ADWD

Bran’s vision is a journey backwards in time, so the heart tree grew larger over time.

Similar the Conqueror, the Builder’s work required blood.

Then, as he watched, a bearded man forced a captive down onto his knees before the heart tree. A white-haired woman stepped toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in her hand.

“No,” said Bran, “no, don’t,” but they could not hear him, no more than his father had. The woman grabbed the captive by the hair, hooked the sickle round his throat, and slashed. And through the mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch as the man’s feet drummed against the earth … but as his life flowed out of him in a red tide, Brandon Stark could taste the blood.

 While the Starks have associations with the element of ice, their primary connections are to the element of earth. Much like the Builder’s greatest works (Winterfell, Storm’s End, possibly even the Hightower, and even the Wall) are strong and enduring, still standing after thousands of years.

 Whereas the power of fire as manifest in the dragons is the power to destroy and forge (a fundamentally inorganic process), the power of earth as manifest in the weirwood and infused into Winterfell, is to know and control. Greenseeing provides a limitless well of knowledge and wisdom, and skinchanging allows a human to create a lasting and powerful bond that can be either symbiotic, as with the warg, or parasitic, as with Varamyr and the bear (who hated him).

The Dragon and Winterfell

Dany’s dragons, as beings that she gave life in a ritual act of burning, are the direct catalyst of the identity she has for herself: A Mother, and in particular, the Mother of Dragons.

 Dany struggles to accept the full implications of the role. Her dragons are wild, “fire made flesh” and often leave chaos in their wake:

 The winged shadow, the grieving father called him. He was the largest of her three, the fiercest, the wildest, with scales as black as night and eyes like pits of fire.

 Dany did not want to talk about the dragons. Farmers still came to her court with burned bones, complaining of missing sheep, though Drogon had not returned to the city. Some reported seeing him north of the river, above the grass of the Dothraki sea. Down in the pit, Viserion had snapped one of his chains; he and Rhaegal grew more savage every day.

At the same time, Dany finds that violent power alluring:

“If you were grown,” she told Drogon, scratching him between the horns, “I’d fly you over the walls and melt that harpy down to slag.”

Her desires for peace are ultimately impossible, both because of the warlike idealism embodied in the dragons, and because of her circumstances (namely the implacability of her enemies, the slave masters). Simply put, war and violence suit her deeper impulses:

I hate this, thought Daenerys Targaryen. How did this happen, that I am drinking and smiling with men I’d sooner flay? … This is peace, she told herself. This is what I wanted, what I worked for, this is why I married Hizdahr. So why does it taste so much like defeat? –Dany, ADWD

All of the entertainers were slaves. That had been part of the peace, that slaveowners be allowed the right to bring their chattels into Meereen without fear of having them freed. In return the Yunkai’i had promised to respect the rights and liberties of the former slaves that Dany had freed. A fair bargain, Hizdahr said, but the taste it left in the queen’s mouth was foul. She drank another cup of wine to wash it out.-Dany, ADWD.

Fire, dragons, and war offer Dany what she truly craves: total, complete victory over the slaveowners that she so deeply hates.

In contrast to the fire-forged Iron Throne, Winterfell is described as being an almost organic creation; asymmetrical, somehow sentient and with a will of its own:

Winterfell was a grey stone labyrinth of walls and towers and courtyards and tunnels spreading out in all directions. In the older parts of the castle, the halls slanted up and down so that you couldn’t even be sure what floor you were on. The place had grown over the centuries like some monstrous stone tree, Maester Luwin told him once, and its branches were gnarled and thick and twisted, its roots sunk deep into the earth.

The builders had not even leveled the earth; there were hills and valleys behind the walls of Winterfell.-Bran, AGOT

It forbids and resents the intrusion of outsiders, something that non-Starks feel intensely, in the godswood and the crypts most of all:

Catelyn had never liked this godswood… It was a dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for ten thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it. It smelled of moist earth and decay…This was a place of deep silence and brooding shadows

[Tyrion] remembered their godswood… That wood was Winterfell. It was the north. I never felt so out of place as I did when I walked there, so much an unwelcome intruder.-Tyrion, ACOK

[Jon] dreamt he was back in Winterfell, limping past the stone kings on their thrones. Their grey granite eyes turned to follow him as he passed, and their grey granite fingers tightened on the hilts of the rusted swords upon their laps. You are no Stark, he could hear them mutter, in heavy granite voices. There is no place for you here.-Jon, ASOS

“Strong” is a quality attached to Winterfell, to other associated symbols of House Stark, and one that Bran aspires too and that draws him down the path toward becoming the Rebuilder, exploring the magic he’s inherited.

The grey is strong. Stronger than he knows.”-Jojen about Bran/Summer, ACOK.

The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I’m not dead either.-Bran, ACOK

[He was] Prince of the green, prince of the wolfswood. He was strong and swift and fierce, and all that lived in the good green world went in fear of him.-Bran, ASOS

Whereas Dany is drawn to the dragon because it promises uncompromising victory and power in contrast to a young queen who must negotiate, Bran seeks strength as a wolf and lord of Winterfell as a way to endure, to have a kind of dignity from that in contrast to his brokenness.

Of Dragons and Trees

Bran and Dany’s final chapters in ADWD are in many senses the climax of their training in magical monarchy. They take journeys as far from the human world, of its sophistication, comforts, and pretenses, into the world of magic as they have ever been or will likely go. And they mirror perfectly, the queen ascending out and upward toward the sun and blue sky from which fire comes, and the king down and into the darkest reaches from which the weirwood and Winterfell, grow. Each lives for hours, even days at a time, inside intense visions of magical and supernatural significance, and the intensity of this experience breaks them to their base elements and rebuilds them anew. The visions are of such a vivid quality, Bran in particular has a hard time differentiating them from physical reality:

Some days Bran wondered if all of this wasn’t just some dream. Maybe he had fallen asleep out in the snows and dreamed himself a safe, warm place. You have to wake, he would tell himself, you have to wake right now, or you’ll go dreaming into death. Once or twice he pinched his arm with his fingers, really hard, but the only thing that did was make his arm hurt. In the beginning he had tried to count the days by making note of when he woke and slept, but down here sleeping and waking had a way of melting into one another. Dreams became lessons, lessons became dreams, things happened all at once or not at all. Had he done that or only dreamed it?

[Dany] dreamed. All her cares fell away from her, and all her pains as well, and she seemed to float upward into the sky. She was flying once again, spinning, laughing, dancing, as the stars wheeled around her and whispered secrets in her ear. “To go north, you must journey south. To reach the west, you must go east. To go forward, you must go back. To touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.” “Quaithe?” Dany called. “Where are you, Quaithe?” Then she saw. Her mask is made of starlight. “Remember who you are, Daenerys,” the stars whispered in a woman’s voice. “The dragons know. Do you?”

Dany’s journey is literally searing flight marked by burning and fire, and takes place where literally no trees grow:

The rocks had scraped her hands raw…Her skin was pink and tender, and a pale milky fluid was leaking from her cracked palms, but her burns were healing.

The air smelled of ash, every rock and tree in sight was scorched and blackened, the ground strewn with burned and broken bones, yet it had been home to him.

Dany knew the lure of home.

She had survived as best she could on the dragon’s leavings, on burned bones and chunks of smoking meat, half-charred and half-raw.

The sun grew hotter as it rose, and before long her head was pounding.

She might live for years amongst the sunbaked rocks of Dragonstone

“Drogon killed a little girl. Her name was … her name …” Dany could not recall the child’s name. That made her so sad that she would have cried if all her tears had not been burned away

…her feet sore and blistered.

The day grew warmer, and the sun beat down upon her head and the burnt remnants of her hair.

Dany, starved, slid off his back and ate with him, ripping chunks of smoking meat from the dead horse with bare, burned hands

Bran’s is consumed with darkness:

Under the hill, the broken boy sat upon a weirwood throne, listening to whispers in the dark as ravens walked up and down his arms.

Down here there was no wind, no snow, no ice, no dead things reaching out to grab you, only dreams and rushlight and the kisses of the ravens. And the whisperer in darkness.

Under the hill, Jojen brooded, Meera fretted, and Hodor wandered through dark tunnels with a sword in his right hand and a torch in his left.

No sunlight ever reached the caves beneath the hill. No moonlight ever touched those stony halls. Even the stars were strangers there.

Light entered as a trespasser, unwanted and unwelcome, and soon was gone again; cookfires, candles, and rushes burned for a little while, then guttered out again, their brief lives at an end.

He liked it better when the torches were put out. In the dark he could pretend that it was the three-eyed crow who whispered to him and not some grisly talking corpse.

He raised a hand, and the other singers began to move about the cavern, extinguishing the torches one by one. The darkness thickened and crept toward them.

In the raw and fearsome dream they enter, two signature passages mark themselves as embodying, right or wrong, the inheritance left to Bran and Dany by their monarchical ancestors:

“Never fear the darkness, Bran. The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother’s milk. Darkness will make you strong.”

You are the blood of the dragon. The whispering was growing fainter, as if Ser Jorah were falling farther behind. Dragons plant no trees. Remember that. Remember who you are, what you were made to be. Remember your words.

Each frames the choice to accept this legacy within the context their inability, or failure, to be anything else:

Meereen was not her home, and never would be. It was a city of strange men with strange gods and stranger hair, of slavers wrapped in fringed tokars, where grace was earned through whoring, butchery was art, and dog was a delicacy. Meereen would always be the Harpy’s city, and Daenerys could not be a harpy.

I was going to be a knight, Bran remembered. I used to run and climb and fight. It seemed a thousand years ago…

Bran did not want to be married to a tree … but who else would wed a broken boy like him? A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of ancient trees. A greenseer.

Bran and Dany also understand the to choice as a complete and total abandonment of their childhood dreams or childish wants:

He had thought the three-eyed crow would be a sorcerer, a wise old wizard who could fix his legs, but that was some stupid child’s dream, he realized now. I am too old for such fancies.

You are a queen, her bear said. In Westeros. “It is such a long way,” she complained. “I was tired, Jorah. I was weary of war. I wanted to rest, to laugh, to plant trees and see them grow. I am only a young girl.”

Ultimately, they accept it, ready to return to the human world with their old selves discarded and their new identities, ones created for them by their ancestors and destiny itself:

A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of ancient trees. A greenseer. He ate.

“Fire and Blood,” Daenerys told the swaying grass

Conclusion

One author characterizes Dany’s intoning of her house’s words as “a rejection of Meereen. A rejection of peace. A rejection of bending over backward to protect innocent life. A rejection of  ‘planting trees.’ And instead, an embrace of vague, violent rhetoric about who she is ‘made to be’ — and her words, ‘fire and blood.’

Bran’s own final vision shows him the blood price of what it took to draw from the magic of the heart tree, and imbue its strength into the “monstrous stone tree” that is Winterfell:

Then, as he watched, a bearded man forced a captive down onto his knees before the heart tree. A white-haired woman stepped toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in her hand.

“No,” said Bran, “no, don’t,” but they could not hear him, no more than his father had. The woman grabbed the captive by the hair, hooked the sickle round his throat, and slashed. And through the mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch as the man’s feet drummed against the earth … but as his life flowed out of him in a red tide, Brandon Stark could taste the blood.

Fitting with Bran’s other connections to the Fisher King,(also called “the Wounded King”) before he drinks blood from ASOIAF’s equivalent of the Holy Grail, he is still “the broken boy”, but once he does, he is “Brandon Stark” having now seen the greatest extent of the Builder’s legacy and been healed by divinity.

The same writer at the Meereenese Blot concluded based on Dany’s final chapter:

Since the first book, Dany has been tormented by the innocent lives lost when she unleashes violence and war. Now, she has apparently resolved to stop letting all this bother her. Her new ‘fire and blood’ approach just seems likely to lead to many more Astapors and thousands more Hazzeas. But in this chapter Dany seems prepared to write them off, as sad but necessary collateral damage of her embracing her true ‘dragon’ self and who she was ‘made to be.’ This is the tragedy of Dany. She achieved peace. And then she decided war felt better to her.

But if Bran’s visions of the sacrifices to the heart tree, TWIOAF accounts of the wars that were “legion” between House Stark and its rivals, (namely the Boltons), and Ser Bartimus’s tale of the entrails hung in the branches of its notably huge weirwood after the victory of Brandon the Ice Eyes, tell us anything, it is that while the Conqueror and the Builder may have taken fundamentally opposite approaches to ruling and expanding their realms, blood (a lot of blood), was always a part of the price. And whether it is the ability of bend other living beings to your will, as Bran does with animals, even with another human being, (an abomination he does not grasp the moral ramifications of), or the total indiscriminate destructive force of the dragon, so was the use of fearsome power.

Their final chapters mark the furthest extent of their travel from the human world, and also an end of their childhood. In a very real sense, Bran and Dany do not return from their transmigrations. Those young children aren’t coming back, monarchs are: Brandon Stark, King of Winter, and Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons.

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The Ned x Bran Parallels Post

Also, Hufflepuffs!

This is a post that was inspired by an anon’s question:

Who is the most Hufflepuff? Arya, Bran or Sansa? It doesn’t matter if they have traits from other houses, honestly, who doesn’t?

After pondering it for awhile, I began to think of not only just how well Bran fits in with a Hufflepuff sorting, but also how Ned does as well. That in turn, led to thinking of the parallels not just between their personalities, but also how they came to be the Stark in Winterfell and how they feel about it.

Yes, Bran for me is not just the most Hufflepuff, he’s really a pure Hufflepuff by the time his transformation from boy to the Lord of Winterfell is done in ACOK. 

The Stark kids’ story arcs are about coming-of-age, and so the reader should view them not as an artificial altering, but as an organic growth into the adults they were meant to be. So even of that isn’t how people actually are in real life, the Starks’ heroic trials burn away the superficial to reveal them for “who they really are”, and hence the semi-adults we see in ADWD-TWOW.

Which is why need to talk about Bran’s place as the younger boy who must take a up the place of lordship after his father and brother depart for the South and are murdered there, (and who so resents the responsibilities he must take on as a result), and how this is a close reenactment of his father’s own life.

Bran is Ned 2.0, updated with all the magical powers and magical animal friends you need to run your magical castle.

“I Never Asked for This Cup to Pass to Me.”

It is plain to the reader how Ned Stark came to be Lord of Winterfell. His father and then older brother were murdered by King Aerys, and then immediately Ned must flee the Vale, marshal the northern lords for war and march south to fight in Robert’s Rebellion.

What is less obvious among the huge scope of the narrative is how bitter Ned is over this:

“That brought a bitter twist to Ned’s mouth. “Brandon. Yes. Brandon would know what to do. He always did. It was all meant for Brandon. You, Winterfell, everything. He was born to be a King’s Hand and a father to queens. I never asked for this cup to pass to me.”

He essentially views everything that currently belongs to him as a hand-me-down, even his wife. He identifies all of these things, in turn, as responsibilities that have to be endured as well, suggesting that once upon a time, Ned had boyish dreams of his own. What exactly, we’ll never know.

By the time he we meet him, however, it is clear that Ned has become otherwise subsumed into the role. It is his life and his identity, and what is familiar and comforting for him. Ned Stark has become a true believer in the fulfilling of his duty to his family and his people:

“A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.”-Bran, AGOT

Back in Winterfell, they had eaten in the Great Hall almost half the time. Her father used to say that a lord needed to eat with his men if he hoped to keep them. “Know the men that follow you,” she heard him tell Robb once, “And let them know you. Don’t ask your men to die for a stranger.” At Winterfell, he always had a an extra seat set at his own table, and everyday a different man would be asked to join him.-Arya, ACOK

If I could characterize Ned as anything, it would be a gruff, sad Hufflepuff. To paraphrase tumblr here: Doing the thing in a gutsy way matters less than just doing the thing. Even bravery, he teaches his son, is best when it is the result of pure willpower in the face of adversity:

[Bran]: “Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?”

[Eddard]: “That is the only time a man can be brave.”

After being commanded to come south by King Robert, he “was filled with a terrible sense of foreboding. This was his place, here in the north.” Even the way his marriage is characterized by the valuing of hard work over all else. Catelyn describes their relationship as built “slowly, stone by stone, over the years.”

Bran’s own cycle of emotions about being the Stark in Winterfell is the same as his father’s.

He too, feels as though he lives in his brother’s shadow:

The foot soldiers and townsfolk were cheering Robb as he rode past, Bran knew; cheering for Lord Stark, for the Lord of Winterfell on his great stallion, with his cloak streaming and Grey Wind racing beside him. They would never cheer for him that way, he realized with a dull ache. He might be the lord in Winterfell while his brother and father were gone, but he was still Bran the Broken.

Before his fall, and before his brother’s departure and then murder, Bran had a his own dreams of what he wanted his life to be:

Bran was going to be a knight himself someday, one of the Kingsguard… Bran knew all the stories. Their names were like music to him.

But his first extended conversation with anyone is a contradiction of this, a sermon delivered from the king of getting-what-you-didn’t-want-and-learning-to-like-it, Ned Stark:

“One day, Bran, you will be Robb’s bannerman, holding a keep of your own for your brother and your king, and justice will fall to you. When that day comes, you must take no pleasure in the task, but neither must you look away. A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.”

It’s like he doesn’t know his own son, or just as important, that what his son wants out of life doesn’t matter. Bran’s fall firmly seals this reality. His dreams of knighthood are destroyed, and he is prevented from leaving Winterfell and going south.

The other Stark POV’s, willingly or unwillingly, go into other cultural spheres or lands because those places have things to teach them. Sansa goes to Kings Landing and the Vale, and there learns from liars and manipulators of all stripes; Arya learns the principals of stealth, guile and killing from Braavosi; Jon learns about the true nature of the war he’s fighting from the people he thought were his enemies, the Free Folk.

The non-POV’s, Robb and Rickon, enter alien spheres as well in some capacity. Robb was crowned “King in the North”, but not coincidentally he was never King while in the North, and Rickon is currently on Skagos, with a people who apart from both the North and the Free Folk, a third element.

But Bran’s story has only ever more closely bound him to the North and the Stark heritage. His last climb atop the wall of Winterfell give us the most complete descriptions of its architecture but also the rhythms of life for its people. His ACOK chapters take us through the Crypts and tell us the history of the all the kings and lords who rest there. His ADWD chapters show us the Children of the Forest, who are said to have helped the Builder construct Winterfell and solidify the Bran’s connections to the Last Hero (He and the Builder were probably the same person, and he was a greenseer).

And at first, Bran hates all of it. He pesters Luwin with questions about knights and how many are among the northern forces, and his childish defiance causes the maester to remark, “‘Listen, and it may be that you will learn something of what lordship is all about,’“

We are clued in as well, that Ned may have once been a dreamier sort of person, before his time as a lord and in war. Like Bran, knows many stories of the past, and almost certainly heard them from Old Nan as well. Bran says of him,

“[He] sat solemnly on his horse, long brown hair stirring in the wind… He had a grim cast to his grey eyes this day, and he seemed not at all the man who would sit before the fire in the evening and talk softly of the age of heroes and the children of the forest. He had taken off Father’s face, Bran thought, and donned the face of Lord Stark of Winterfell.  

But that “face”, that mask has become him. Ned returns to the North after the Greyjoy Rebellion and doesn’t pass Moat Cailin to see his foster brother, (his best friend that he fought a war for) for 17 years. When trying to avoid going south, he falls back on the bedrock of his identity: “My duties are here in the north.”

After his fall from the tower, performing his duties as the Stark in Winterfell consume almost every facet of his life. It consumes most of his time, and frames his relationship with everyone around him:

“Most of the morning was given over to talk of grains and greens and salting meat.”-Bran, ACOK

The maester had taught him all the banners…And soon enough he learned the faces too, when the lords and their sons and knights retainer came to Winterfell to feast.- Bran, AGOT

Bran knew what to say. ‘Thank you for the notion, my lord,’ he blurted out before Ser Rodrik could speak.”-Bran, ACOK

[Meera] is looking at me, Bran realized. He had to make some answer. “My brother Robb is fighting in the south,” he said, “but you can say your words to me, if you like.”

[The Reeds say their oath]

Bran groped for words. Was he supposed to swear something back to them? Their oath was not one he had been taught. “May your winters be short and your summers bountiful,” he said. That was usually a good thing to say. “Rise. I’m Brandon Stark.”-Bran, ACOK

The idea of duty also becomes bound up with Bran’s ideas about being an adult. He refers to both his father and brother wearing “the face of Lord Stark”, and to him that becomes synonymous with maturity. He sets up the idea of being an adult lord as being opposite to being a child when he says, “He was the Prince of Winterfell…not some little baby boy like Rickon” (Bran, ASOS). Rickon is young, impatient, and wild, all the things Bran has been taught no true lord can be. In turn, this is a reflection of how Ned thinks of his (slightly) younger foster brother, Robert Baratheon. Ned agrees reluctantly to become Hand with the idea that he will protect his unwise friend from his enemies, and in turn, Robert views him as the responsible, wiser older brother:

[Ned]: We are not the boys we were.

[Robert]: You were never the boy you were.

-Ned, AGOT

“Damn you, Ned Stark. You and Jon Arryn, I loved you both. What have you done to me? You were the one should have been king, you or Jon.”-Ned, AGOT

With nothing else left to him, Bran takes pride in that all important thing: Duty, and that reshapes his image of himself and what he values:

Why must he waste his time listening to old men speak of things he only half understood? Because you’re broken, a voice reminded him. A lord on his cushioned chair might be crippled, but not a knight on his destier. Besides, it was his duty. -Bran, ACOK

“As you will, my prince,” said Ser Rodrik. “You did well.” Bran flushed with pleasure. Being a lord was not so tedious as he had feared.-Bran, ACOK

Ned tells Arya of their situation in Kings Landing, “We have come to a dark dangerous place, child. This is not Winterfell. We have enemies who mean us ill.” Similar to his father, once he is separated from Winterfell, he feels disoriented and lost, without any real place in the world. In ACOK, before his exile, Bran evokes Luwin’s teachings after chastising the Walders for taunting Hodor: ”A good lord protects his people.” So it is with a sense of having totally failed as a person when he calls himself, “’The Prince of Winterfell.’ Of Winterfell burned and tumbled, its people scattered and slain,” and wonders in despair, “How can you be the prince of someplace you might never see again?”(ASOS).

The heart of Ned’s and Bran’s struggles with their destinies is overcoming not fear or ultimate evil, but self-centeredness. Each is asked to, time and time again, to let go of their personal wants. First, Bran must let go of the allure of glorious knighthood; next, he must let go of childish distractions to listen to listen to “old men speak of things he only half understood?” and attend to the mundane realities of being a lord. Next, he must learn from Jojen to use his warging powers not to run wild and be free as “the Prince of the Green”, but to control Summer to hunt for food to save their lives. Currently, he struggles with his childishly selfish actions by skinchanging Hodor.

Ned’s final act in life was to put his daughter Sansa’s life before his honor by confessing to crimes he did not commit. It for selfishness that Varys chides him during their final exchange,

“If I [falsely confess], my word would be as hollow as an empty suit of armor. My life is not so precious to me as that.”

“Pity.” The eunuch stood. “And your daughter’s life, my lord? How precious is that?”-Ned, AGOT

Essentially, Bran’s faces the prospect of having to grow up, and that occurs by having to do what so few lords in Westeros do: put the welfare of their subjects ahead of themselves. If Bran’s arc points to anything, his next choice will be putting aside a strong, healthy of “his own” (actually Hodor’s), in order to continue his journey toward being the Rebuilder, the greenseer lord of Winterfell that his people need him to be.

So perhaps it was deliberately written by GRRM, with a multitude of meanings intended, that Ned remarked, “Brandon had been twenty when he died…He was the true heir, the eldest, born to rule.”

There are several interesting readings here. One is that GRRM is being deliberately ironic; Ned’s comments will turn out to be much more true for his own son than for his older brother, but for reasons that include why Ned was such an excellent lord himself. Consistency, caution, and humility are what made Ned and his second son such excellent lords, not as he calls it, “the wolf blood”, that hot-temper and rigidity that contributed to deaths of the first sons of both generations, Brandon and Robb. But it is also true for reasons that Ned can’t fathom, but that his son will soon know; the magic interwoven into Winterfell’s very stones, the true purpose behind its creation, and the literalness of the connection between the Builder, the Last Hero and the Singers.

thanks again to thegoldofwinterfell for editing yet another meta for me!

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The Heroic Journeys of Bran, Arya and Sansa

Joseph Campbell in the first paragraph most famous work, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” said of all the hero stories of the world:

It will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.

That “suggestion of more” is the catalyst that causes the story of the hero to be constantly reinvented and re-imagined. Whether it’s the modern English Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the Greek Perseus, the Indian Prince Guatama, or the Inuit hero Kiviuq, all the heroic stories of the world “boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.”

It is now generally agreed that Campbell overreached; when applied too broadly, the idea of the Hero’s Journey, what he called the Monomyth, becomes almost meaningless. This is especially true for stories that lack a clearly defined hero who is a warrior or leader, and those stories that don’t originate from Indo-European culture. He also used psychoanalysis as a basis for connecting many myths together in his research, but this is no longer very common among those who write about the Hero’s Journey.

Indeed, in modern fiction it is arguable that the idea that there is a Monomyth has had as much of an effect on writers as perhaps any actual structure that its embedded deep in the human psyche that shapes our mythology (read: Star Wars).

Within ASOIAF, the Hero’s Journey is a structure that serves an essential purpose, its presence in the character arcs of Bran, Arya and Sansa uniting them as a triad.

The structure of the Hero’s Journey reinforces their overall narrative unity. They are the heirs to House Stark’s future and its leaders, the tale of its rebirth both made possible and embodied in their shared coming-of-age. Each passes through at roughly similar times the stages of the Heroic Cycle:

The World of the Ordinary: A relatively carefree childhood of naive beliefs and dreams (often even more romanticized in memory after     enduring their heroic trials and horrors).

The Call to Adventure: A mentor beckons them to go and enter a strange and unfamiliar world or path (in Bran and Arya’s case,     supernatural and magical) that frightens them.

The Refusal of the Call: the Stark children initially resist the call and refuse to go to their destinies.

The Passing of the First Threshold: Guided by new mentors, they are     taken across a perilous and symbolic boundary that separates the world   they know from the one beyond, which is magical, alluring and dangerous.

Trials and Temptations: The Stark children endure horrific suffering, including starvation, violence, enslavement, and sexual assault and are tempted by anger, self-pity, depression and dissociation.

The Abyss: The Heroes reach a point of almost total hopelessness     and despair, believing that they will never see Winterfell or their families again. It is while in the Abyss that the transformation begun by the heroic trials is completed as they are trained by their mentors in new magic, skills and wisdom. It is a time of death and rebirth, their old identities broken down and made new.

The Coming Return: After their transformative time in the Abyss, the Heroes are set up to return to the North with the magic, knowledge, and courage to save their people from the invasion of the Others. Joseph Campbell referred to what variously is to the archetypal hero the artifact, power or knowledge they return with as the “ultimate boon”, which they can bestow on humankind to save them from damnation or destruction.

Because Campbell scoured the entire world and its largest cultures in search of a common structure in heroic mythology, he also believed that the Hero came in a handful of different forms. Two of them are relevant here and influence the characterization of Arya and Bran: The Warrior and The Emperor. Some have pointed out that Campbell was misogynist in his skewing his focus towards male mythological figures. Campbell simply did not analyze what cultures see as the feminine aspects and archetypes of their mythology: the princess, the moon, water, motherhood or sisterhood.  These feminine aspects are vital to the analysis of Sansa and Arya Stark, and thus I will incorporate them in due course.

And once again, I owe a huge thanks to kittenbalerion, who helped me edit and restructure this piece.

The Childhood of the Hero

The Stark children each begin their journey’s as exactly that: truly, children, with childish ideas, beliefs, and attitudes.

Bran and Sansa have idealized visions for what they will be as adults. He desires knighthood, and she has a very dreamlike idea of what her life in King’s Landing will be like:

“Bran was going to be a knight himself someday, one of the Kingsguard… Bran knew all the stories. Their names were like music to him.” –Bran, AGOT

“She needed no wine. She was drunk on the magic of the night, giddy with glamour, swept away by beauties she had dreamt of all her life and never dared hope to know. –Sansa, AGOT

In order to survive, these hopes and dreams are brutalized out of them. Bran is crippled forced to take up the mantle of the Stark in Winterfell, and Sansa is betrayed and abused by the southron people she trusted and idealized.

“His eyes stung. He wanted to be down there, laughing and running. Angry at the thought, Bran knuckled away the tears before they could fall.”- Bran, AGOT

He speaks more gently than Joffrey, she thought, but the queen spoke to me gently too. He’s still a Lannister, her brother and Joff’s uncle, and no friend. Once she had loved Prince Joffrey with all her heart, and admired and trusted his mother, the queen. They had repaid that love and trust with her father’s head. Sansa would never make that mistake again. –Sansa, ASOS

Arya, despite the sense of inadequacy she feels over Sansa’s, Jeyne’s and Mordane’s insults (and even more importantly, her parents’ tacit allowance of this) is also quite bubbly, carefree, adventurous and naive:

“One day [Arya] came back grinning her horsey grin, her hair all tangled and her clothes covered in mud, clutching a raggedy bunch of purple and green flowers for Father.” –Sansa, AGOT

Arya could reveal herself to Lady Whent, and the knights would escort her home and keep her safe. That was what knight’s did, they kept you safe, especially women.”–Arya, ACOK

Arya values loyalty and companionship above all else, and her experiences with knights and like-minded adults, especially adult men, is betrayal after betrayal:

“Arya had loved nothing better than to sit at her father’s table and listen to them talk… freeriders tough as leather, courtly knights and bold young squires, grizzled old men-at-arms… She hated the sounds of their voices now, the way they laughed, the stories they told. They’d been her friends, she’d felt safe around them, but now she knew that was a lie. Hot Pie and Gendry had left her just as soon as they could, and Lord Beric and the outlaws only wanted to ransom her, just like the Hound. None of them wanted her around.” -Arya, ASOS

The Call to Adventure

The Starks receive their calls to adventure only after they are beginning to enter into a state of mind to embrace them; that is, one of sorrow and disillusionment, after their father and then mother’s murder, Sansa’s imprisonment, the horrors on the forced march to Harrenhall, and Bran’s fall from the Tower.

The parallels are incredibly specific at this stage: they receive the call to adventure from figures who are emissaries or representatives of the mentors whose tutelage they enter into in AFFC/ADWD and also escort them across the Threshold later on.

For Bran, the call to adventure comes early on and he hears it repeatedly, first in dreams from the Three Eyed Crow, and then from Jojen (Maester Luwin also acts a mentor who propels his growth as Bran the Builder reborn):

Now, Bran, the crow urged. Choose. Fly or die. –Bran, AGOT

“I dream of a tree sometimes. A weirwood, like the one in the godswood. It calls to me. –Bran, AGOT

Arya hears the call from Jaqen, a representative of the Faceless Men and the Kindly Man, in the same way that the Three Eyed Crow is for Bloodraven and the Singers in the Cave: “If you would learn, you must come with me…Far and away, across the narrow sea.” (Arya, ACOK)

Ser Dontos is an agent, however, bumbling and ultimately somewhat pathetic, of Littlefinger, and he gives Sansa the call to “adventure“ and will eventually escort her across the symbolic boundary into the world of intrigue and deception that Littlefinger wishes to make her truly a part of, a “player of the game”: “Come to the godswood tonight, if you want to go home.” –Sansa, ACOK

It rather unexpectedly but well expresses the reality the Starks face: the journeys they take end with home, but it’s not the path they want. Hence…

The Refusal of the Call

While Campbell initially described this stage as usually being a permanent one, in much of modern thinking and interpretation of the Hero’s Journey, it is considered normal, even necessary for dramatic tension, for the Hero to be reluctant and even actively resist heeding the call to adventure. For the Stark children, this more or less means that they are very reluctant, and in fact, only leave when their circumstances leave them no other actual choice.

He was making Bran angry. “I don’t have to tell you my dreams. I’m the prince. I’m the Stark in Winterfell.” “Was it Summer?” “You be quiet.” “The night of the harvest feast, you dreamed you were Summer in the godswood, didn’t you?” “Stop it!” Bran shouted. Summer slid toward the weirwood, his white teeth bared… “Jojen is making him angry.” Meera shook out her net. “It’s your anger, Bran,” her brother said. “Your fear.” “It isn’t. I’m not a wolf.” Yet he’d howled with them in the night, and tasted blood in his wolf dreams. –Bran

And there it is; a denial of the implications of what it means to be Brandon, the Stark in Winterfell, and the denial to know. This choice is not framed in opposition to his place as an heir and lord, but instead in opposition to the childhood dream of knighthood:

“A knight is what you want. A warg is what you are.”-Bran, ACOK

“I was a prince, Jojen,” he told the older boy. “I was the prince of the woods.” “You are a prince,” Jojen reminded him softly. “You remember, don’t you? Tell me who you are.” “Bran,” he said sullenly. Bran the Broken. “Brandon Stark.” The cripple boy. “The Prince of Winterfell.“-Bran, ASOS

Arya’s refusal of the call is phrased somewhat differently; she seeks not to stay where she is when she receives, but to go to safety, to her family and her brother Jon most of all:

“I can’t. I have to go home. To Winterfell.”-Arya, ACOK

“I want to go north, to the Wall. Here, I can pay.” She gave him the purse. “The Night’s Watch has a castle on the sea.-Arya, ASOS

Sansa’s refusal is also not so literal. She lies so extensively, even herself, that her lack of agency is almost an unspoken fact of the situation, because it doesn’t need to be spoken. It’s taken for granted: “I never asked to play, the game was too dangerous. One slip and I’m dead.”-Sansa, AFFC.

In some sense, she takes advantage of this, letting others become so confident in their decisions around her fate that they begin to underestimate her. As she begins to play the role of “Alayne Stone“, she tells Baelish, “I’m Alayne, father. Who else would I be?” She invites him to apparently let him make a decision to alter her identity, hiding her true feelings.

This is directly parallel to her little brother’s thoughts about his own evolution into Bran the Rebuilder: Bran had never asked to be a prince. It was knighthood he had always dreamed of; bright armor and streaming banners, lance and sword, a warhorse between his legs.

By inflicting such agony and suffering on his hero’s through the dramatic tension between the necessity and the loss caused by their transformation, GRRM creates a very moving and sad image of the Hero and their journey. It feels less triumphant than tragic.

The Crossing of the Threshold

Like other stages of the Hero’s Journey, the thresholds they cross into the world of adventure, the unknown and the magical are tailored by GRRM to fit into themes that stretch across their entire arc: Bran passes through the Builder’s two greatest structures: first the walls of Winterfell, and then the Wall itself, boundaries that are intensely magical and designed as weapons against humanity’s greatest enemy, the Others; Arya, whose story is full of moon and water imagery, is literally ferried across a “narrow” body of water; Sansa takes a path once taken by her father, but it was the beginning of a new life, whereas for him it was a an end, towards yet another set of suitors who either want to sexually exploit her or her social status.

[Jojen]: “The gods give many gifts, Bran…and to you… you could be more than me, Bran. You are the winged wolf, and there is no saying how far and high you might fly… if you had someone to teach you.”

If they stayed here, hidden down beneath Tumbledown Tower, no one would find them. He would stay alive. And crippled.

Bran realized he was crying. Stupid baby, he thought at himself. No matter where he went, to Karhold or White Harbor or Greywater Watch, he’d be a cripple when he got there. He balled his hands into fists. “I want to fly,” he told them. “Please. Take me to the crow.”-Bran, ASOS

Bran’s situation most literally illustrates the illusion of choice for the Stark children not just for the passing of the threshold, but for the Hero’s Journey as a whole. Nominally, he is given a choice by the Reeds to stay in Tumbledown Tower, but they never could survive there during the Winter of the invasion of the Others. Bloodraven has done everything that his magical abilities to haunt Bran and draw him to his destiny that increasingly insistent:

“Fly or die!” cried the three-eyed crow as it pecked at him. He wept and pleaded but the crow had no pity. It put out his left eye and then his right, and when he was blind in the dark it pecked at his brow, driving its terrible sharp beak deep into his skull. He screamed until he was certain his lungs must burst. The pain was an axe splitting his head apart, but when the crow wrenched out its beak all slimy with bits of bone and brain, Bran could see again.”-Bran, AGOT

“You are the winged wolf, Bran,” said Jojen. “I wasn’t sure when we first came, but now I am. The crow sent us here to break your chains.”-Bran, ACOK

Once Arya reaches Saltpans, she feels (and is almost certainly right), that going to Braavos and finding the House of Black and White is the only option she has left:

Her home was gone, her parents dead, and all her brothers slain but Jon Snow on the Wall. That was where she had wanted to go. She told the captain as much, but even the iron coin did not sway him. Arya never seemed to find the places she set out to reach.-Arya, ASOS

“You are,” he said, “but the House of Black and White is no place for Arya, of House Stark.”

“Please,” she said. “I have no place to go.”-Arya, AFFC

The most powerful image in invoked in Arya’s crossing is that of a departed soul being ferried across the River Styx to the Underworld. Like a departed soul, Arya is granted a special coin to give to the ferryman, and of course, Him of Many faces is a god of death.

User joannalannister mused that Bran’s crossing evokes rebirth, and in contrast, those of sisters’ evoke imagery of death as it appears in Greek Mythology. There is Arya and the moon, the ferryman and Him of Many Faces, evokes imagery associated with the crossing of the river Styx into death; for Sansa, Petyr Baelish and his offer of pomegranate seeds evokes imagery of Persephone’s kidnapping, which augments the thematic tie to death in Sansa’s arc that has existed since her father killed Lady by the Trident at the beginning of AGOT.

In-universe, the most important parallel for Sansa’s escape from King’s Landing, taking the same path her father took to the brothel. Her relationship and conflict with Baelish is defined by her parents’ history with the man; sexualized and objectified by him (per Cat), a reluctant friend and ultimately a victim of his mechanizations (per Ned).

“Ned studied the rocky face of the bluff for a moment, then followed more slowly. The niches were there, as Littlefinger had promised, shallow cuts that would be invisible from below, unless you knew just where to look for them. The river was a long, dizzying distance below. Ned kept his face pressed to the rock and tried not to look down any more often than he had to.”-Ned, AGOT

“We must climb down,” Ser Dontos said. “At the bottom, a man is waiting to row us out to the ship.” “I’ll fall.” Bran had fallen, and he had loved to climb. “No you won’t. There’s a sort of ladder, a secret ladder, carved into the stone. Here, you can feel it, my lady.” He got down on his knees with her and made her lean over the edge of the cliff, groping with her fingers until she found the handhold cut into the face of the bluff. “Almost as good as rungs.”-Sansa, ASOS

User Starbird1 comments on how Sansa’s crossing is a new beginning, with a life ahead of her, a new age, while Ned’s is the beginning of his end (his heroic deeds behind him) by noting that, “Ned sees the Targaryen armor as a relic of the past, Sansa sees it as something evolving.”

The Abyss

After the Hero has passed the threshold, and endured the trials and temptations of the magical world they have entered, they reach what is both the nadir of their life, and the farthest extent of their magical explorations. That Abyss is crafted to be their personal hell, the final experience that is meant to totally break them down so that their new identities, that of legendary figures, can emerge. It is agonizing death with, in their final AFFC/ADWD chapters, the smallest hint of a light at the end of the tunnel: Rebirth.

Campbell describes “The Abyss” as a place, in his own psychoanalytic and somewhat strange language:

“The well is the World Navel, it’s flaming water the indestructible essence of existence…the sleeping castle is the that ultimate abyss to which the descending consciousness submerges in dream, where the individual life is on the point of dissolving into undifferentiated energy: and it would be death to dissolve; yet death, also, to lack the fire. The motif…of the inexhaustible dish, symbolizing the perpetual life-giving, form-building powers of the universal source…”

Among such “universal sources” or “ultimate boons” he names the World Ash of Nordic myth, Yggdrasil.

Celtic myth, which includes Bran’s real-world forebearer in the Fisher King tradition Bran the Blessed, also has trees as symbols of life and magical energy. Oaks were worshiped because they were the oldest trees in a forest, and as Bloodraven tells Bran, “a weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed.”

Bran once again, has the most literal parallels, beyond it being an actually dark abyss. Campbell‘s phrase “the sleeping is castle is that ultimate abyss to which the descending consciousness submerges in dreams” has direct echoes in Bran’s chapters: You have to wake, he would tell himself, you have to wake right now, or you’ll go dreaming into death.”(Bran, ADWD)

It is the Cave that Bran stares directly into the vast magical void of power and immortality that his ancestor has bound him to by blood (“your blood makes you a greenseer”), and what it means:

[Jojen]: “Earth and water, soil and stone, oaks and elms and willows, they were here before us all and will still remain when we are gone.” “So will you,” said Meera. That made Bran sad. What if I don’t want to remain when you are gone?-he almost asked, but he swallowed the words unspoken.-Bran, ADWD

Bloodraven encourages him to absorb into his being the darkness from which those magical symbols of life and power, the weirwoods, grow:

“Never fear the darkness, Bran. The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother’s milk. Darkness will make you strong.”-Bran, ADWD

It wouldn’t be the first time that time in a dark place caused Bran to take a leap forward in magic:

“He remembered who he was all too well; Bran the boy, Bran the broken. Better Bran the beastling. Was it any wonder he would sooner dream his Summer dreams, his wolf dreams? Here in the chill damp darkness of the tomb his third eye had finally opened.-(Bran, ACOK)

The basis of his misery in the Cave above and beyond his crush on Meera (“‘Don’t cry,’ he said. He wanted to put his arms around her, hold her tight the way his mother used to“) his disability, (”but who else would wed a broken boy like him?”), Bran’s exile seemingly kicks out from under him what the thing that he felt gave his life value, meaning and dignity after his fall from the tower:

“What was he now? Only Bran the broken boy, Brandon of House Stark, prince of a lost kingdom, lord of a burned castle, heir to ruins.”-Bran, ADWD

That is to say, his place as a prince and a lord, The Stark in Winterfell:

“As you will, my prince,” said Ser Rodrik. “You did well.” Bran flushed with pleasure. Being a lord was not so tedious as he had feared.-Bran, ACOK

He had never feared the crypts; they were part of his home and who he was, and he had always known that one day he would lie here too.-Bran, ACOK

Men crowded shoulder to shoulder on the benches. “Stark!” they called as Bran trotted past, rising to their feet. “Winterfell! Winterfell!” …it made him swell with pride. For so long as it took him to ride the length of that hall he forgot that he was broken.-Bran, ACOK

The essence of Bran’s hell is disinheritance and powerlessness.

For Arya, the Abyss is defined by loneliness and existential despair; she has lost her “pack”, and also faces the values and ideology represented by the Faceless Men. They do not believe in loyalty to friend or family, or any kind of justice in this life for the powerless over the powerful other than the shared experience of death.

Arya faces the Abyss in the form of an idea: the nihilism that can one draw from the inevitability of death, represented in the phrase “Valar Morgulis “ and embodied by Him of Many Faces:

“In Qohor he is the Black Goat, in Yi Ti the Lion of Night, in Westeros the Stranger. All men must bow to him in the end, no matter if they worship the Seven or the Lord of Light, the Moon Mother or the Drowned God or the Great Shepherd. All mankind belongs to him… else somewhere in the world would be a folk who lived forever. Do you know of any folk who live forever?”-ARYA, AFFC

For the Faceless Men, this is the ultimate justice, as described in their story of the first Faceless Man, who brought “the gift” first to the slave who pleaded for release, then later to the masters. But it’s not enough for Arya, who says, “He killed the slave?” That did not sound right. “He should have killed the masters!”

Arya recognizes this philosophy for what it is: a kind of spiritual nihilism (although the Faceless Men, again, see this as both justice and the fundamental reality), and the fate of her family, her home and her enemies seems only to have confirmed that: “Joffrey’s dead! She knew it ought to make her happy, but somehow she still felt empty inside. Joffrey was dead, but if Robb was dead too, what did it matter?”(Arya, ASOS)

The good die with the evil, the former a way that seems cruel and heartbreaking, the latter in way that is anti-climatic and ambiguous. For her, House Stark’s defeat is both intensely personal and symbolic triumph of evil over good, leaving her a wolf alone:

“The old gods are dead, she told herself, with Mother and Father and Robb and Bran and Rickon, all dead. A long time ago, she remembered her father saying that when the cold winds blow the lone wolf dies and the pack survives. He had it all backwards. Arya, the lone wolf, still lived, but the wolves of the pack had been taken and slain and skinned.“-Arya, ASOS

The reason Arya hates Dareon, and eventually kills him, is that it is her lashing out, trying to hold onto her code of the pack:

He is a man of the Night’s Watch, she thought, … the singer should be on the Wall… He is fair of face and foul of heart, thought.”-Arya, AFFC

The girl was not sorry, though. Dareon had been a deserter from the Night’s Watch; he had deserved to die.“-Arya, ADWD

Arya doesn’t kill Dareon for some great sin by any other Westerosi code of conduct (though even in the North, it’s desertion and abandonment of duty that would earn Dareon an execution), but for abandoning his own pack.

Everything about Sansa’s Abyss is an inversion. Rather a descent to a dark place below the earth, or being ferried across a body of water as if to the underworld, Sansa makes an ascent to a place high above, that is disconnected from earthly or outside concerns. In the vast empty blue skies around the Eyrie, and in its empty, quiet and lifeless halls, Sansa sees a kind of physical representation of her dissociation from the traumatic facts of her circumstances (and the invention of more pleasant ones that didn’t happen). It the “sleeping castle” that Campbell refers to.

The Eyrie, much like the mentally ill Lysa, has through the very characteristics of its construction separated itself from the reality of the outside world. It is the opposite of the place Sansa long to be: Winterfell. The Eyrie is small and elegant and built far above the ground and its worldy attachments, Winterfell is massive and sprawling, “it’s roots sunk deep into the earth.” The Eyrie, up on its lofty place on the Giant’s Lance, has a godswood whose soil is so barren (probably from the lack of blood sacrifice) that “no matter how much soil was hauled up from the Vale, they could not get a weirwood to take root here”, that symbol of (brutal) life.

Whereas Winterfell is a place that bustles with life and activity, “the men drilling with wood and steel in the yard, the cooks tending their vegetables in the glass garden, restless dogs running back and forth in the kennels, the silence of the godswood, the girls gossiping beside the washing well”, Sansa describes the Eyrie as having a haunting stillness:

There was no quieter castle in all the Seven Kingdoms. The servants here were few and old and kept their voices down so as not to excite the young lord. There were no horses on the mountain, no hounds to bark and growl, no knights training in the yard. Even the footsteps of the guards seemed strangely muffled as they walked the pale stone halls.

As Lysa locked away the roiling dissent of her bannermen, who wished to go to war against the Lannisters, Sansa has locked away her exact memory of her father’s execution (among other things). And Lysa of course, is a perfect representation of Sansa had fate and circumstances been less fortunate, with many parallels between them.

When her aunt forces her head out the Moon Door, Sansa sees the physical manifestation of her detachment from reality, “white sky, falling snow, and nothing else.”

House Arryn is everything House Stark is not: Andal rather than First Men; it’s motto, “High as Honor” speaks of a refusal to embrace the unpleasant and brutal choices of ruling, where “Winter is Coming” comes from a place of a will to do whatever it takes to survive hard times.

Because of this, Sansa describes the Eyrie most of all as being empty, having “a godswood without gods, as empty as me,” and as a place she does not truly wish to be, “a pure world. I do not belong here.”

The time in the Abyss is invaluable and what it teaches or gives to the Hero. Campbell writes that, “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

Who are our Heroes?

What sort of hero, and what sort of person, do our character become after their time in the Abyss? Joseph Campbell and Valerie Frankel, the writer of a theory on mythological heroines, didn’t just describe the stages of the journey; they formulated what they viewed as different categories of heroes and heroines, and thought of them as having fundamentally different goals, both because of their gender but also among those of the same gender due to different abilities, challenges and enemies.

Bran Stark & The Emperor Archetype

The archetype that dominates Bran’s narrative is that of the Magic King (with parallels to King Arthur and his Camelot and Avalon, Bran the Blessed as well as his own ancestor Bran the Builder), an image that Campbell dubs The Emperor.

Campbell contrasts the Warrior with the Emperor by saying, “The symbol of the first is the virtuous sword [read: Needle], of the second, the scepter of dominion, or the book of law.” The adventure of the Emperor “is going to the father-the father is the invisible unknown.”

The Father in the context of Bran’s story is Brandon the Builder and the Old Gods. His name is rarely spoken, but his greatest works and the sacred office he created (The Stark in Winterfell), loom as large in the narrative as they do on the very landscape of Westeros, so fundamental to it that they are taken for granted and barely understood, magical works that are in effect nearly invisible:

“Thousands and thousands of years ago, Brandon the Builder had raised Winterfell, and some said the Wall”-Bran, AGOT

A face had been carved in the trunk of the [weirwood], its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful. They were old, those eyes; older than Winterfell itself. They had seen Brandon the Builder set the first stone, if the tales were true; they had watched the castle’s granite walls rise around them.-Catelyn, AGOT

[Tyrion] remembered their godswood…at the center the heart tree standing like some pale giant frozen in time…That wood was Winterfell. It was the north.”-Tyrion, ACOK

The songs said that Storm’s End had been raised in ancient days by Durran, the first Storm King…Some said the children of the forest helped him build it, shaping the stones with magic; others claimed that a small boy told him what he must do, a boy who would grow to be Bran the Builder.-Catelyn, ACOK

“There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.”

Together with the suggestion of a connection between the Builder and the Last Hero (even that they might have been the same person, given that the former’s works achieved the latter’s goals), the parallels between Bran’s current journey and the Last Hero’s search for the Children of the Forest, and evidence that the Builder was a greenseer and Winterfell is a literal fusion of weirwood and castle, Bran’s character becomes that of the son reclaiming the legacy of the (very distant) father, the “secrets long forgotten in Winterfell”, the pact he made with the Singers in exchange for their magic to fight the Others.

Bran is repeatedly called “the heir”, “prince”, and the only character to be called the “The Stark in Winterfell” on page:

I’m the Prince. I’m the Stark in Winterfell.”

“You are the Stark in Winterfell, and Robb’s heir.”

He was the Stark in Winterfell, his father’s son and his brother’s heir, and almost a man grown.

-Bran, ACOK

“You are our prince as well, our lord’s son, and our king’s true heir.” -Meera Reed to Bran, ASOS

Jojen gazed up at him with his dark green eyes. “There’s nothing here to hurt us, Your Grace.”-Bran, ASOS)

“You are a prince, remember?”-Jojen to Bran, ASOS

“He’s our prince.”-Meera to Samwell Tarly, ASOS

And in the climax of that journey, in the Abyss, he confronts that magical legacy and the primordial unknown that defines the Old Gods:

When they died, they went into the wood, into leaf and limb and root, and the trees remembered. Maesters will tell you that the weirwoods are sacred to the old gods. The singers believe they are the old gods. When singers die they become part of that godhood.”-Bran, ADWD

Time is different for a tree than for a man…a thousand human years are a moment to a weirwood. –Bran, ADWD

It is in the Abyss that the Hero (warrior, emperor, redeemer or otherwise) taps into the ultimate boon, and brings back a piece or symbol of that boon by which he is “blessed by the father to represent the father among men.” This idea of a human chosen by the gods to hold divine power and by doing so become a king is also somewhat represented by Theon Greyjoy’s intoning of the Ironborn saying, “It’s gods that make me but men that make crowns”, in reference to their own mythological founder, the Grey King (after his death, kings were typically elected on the Iron Islands for thousands of years). Thus, the Stark words “Winter is Coming”, are not just a warning but a claim to a divine right to rule that Bran has inherited, one first earned by protecting the North from the Others with “the ultimate boon”: greenseeing, and thus the secrets of Winterfell and its use as a weapon against the Others.

Looking Beyond Campbell: Sansa and Heroine Archetypes

Campbell ignored heroines; more extensively, he ignored what the mythologies of the world’s cultures consider to be feminine; that is, ideas, rituals, and imagery that are domain of women. To understand the heroine and her journey, I turned to Valerie Estelle Frankel’s work, From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey through Myth and Legend.

What separates the journey of the Heroine from the Hero is not so much the stages, but the goal.

“[In very ancient mythology] the archetypal goddess, or Great Mother, dominated all mankind. She was the earth, the sea, the font of all life. Along with her feminine qualities of beauty, imagination, and compassion, she also offered death and savagery…girls emulate that path on their journeys by forming a family circle they can rule as supreme nurturer and protector. The true goal of the heroine is to become this archetypal, all-powerful mother. Thus, many heroines set out on rescue missions in order to restore their shattered families...they redeem beloved family members or potential husbands.”-From Girl to Goddess

If the separated pack, “slain and skinned” is something that haunts Arya, then two images dominates Sansa’s story and shape her princess narrative: The Beauty and the Beast in the form of her relationship to Sandor Clegane (and men in general), and an incarnation of the Wicked Stepmother in the form of Cersei Lannister, each helping to shape her into a very classic Princess in the Tower.

“The Beauty and the Beast” is of course an idea that is reflected in many different fairytales throughout the world in such legends as Bluebeard, and others where maidens are kidnapped by wild animals such as bears and bulls. “On first meeting, these lovers are bloodcurdling and grotesque, making the maiden fear for her life.”

In Sansa’s case, the beast is a “hound”, or rather, “THE Hound.” And he does frighten her:

Strong hands grasped her by the shoulders, and for a moment Sansa thought it was her father, but when she turned, it was the burned face of Sandor Clegane looking down at her, his mouth twisted in a terrible mockery of a smile. “You are shaking, girl,” he said, his voice rasping. “Do I frighten you so much?” He did.-Sansa, AGOT

True to form, GRRM plays with this idea (he has even commented that he is aware of fans shipping Sansan and “played with it a little, in the books”) and adds layers to it. Sandor is man who is both beastly in appearance and behavior. He is drunk and rude to her more than once, (and the scene after the Battle of the Blackwater is all kinds of “not cool” but more on that later), but it is Sandor, more than any other person in Kings Landing, who shows empathy for Sansa and develops a sincere personal connection with her:

“Here, girl.” Sandor Clegane knelt before her, between her and Joffrey. With a delicacy surprising in such a big man, he dabbed at the blood welling from her broken lip.-Sansa, ACOK

Outside of the action itself, Sandor does something else important by the manner of the action. He makes himself into a shield between Sansa and her abuser, and also between her and her father’s head.

Sandor backs up her lie about killing on one’s nameday, he refuses to side with Joffrey about the incident in Wintefell’s training yard (lying about what he said), and when she is stripped and beaten in front of the whole court, he says to Joffrey, “Enough.” And then offers her his cloak to cover herself with.

Of all the men that Sansa has romantic connections too, Sandor is the one who appears to be a beast but ultimately isn’t, while Joffrey, Loras and Harry are handsome, as people they turn out to be cruel or violent or both.

[Sansa]“You’re awful.”

[Sandor] “I’m honest. It’s the world that’s awful.”-Sansa, ACOK

Sandor may not be the most intellectual man, but fans of his character have noted that he is oddly poetic, and in that moment he expresses that he, like Sansa, can see Westerosi society for what it is: violent, cruel and heartless.

“Animal bridegroom stories embodied the real-life fears of women promised to total strangers in marriage, who did not know if they’d find a brute or gentle lover in their marriage bed.”

Sansa is promised to total stranger in marriage, and finds that her prince is a brute. That is where the scene after the Battle of the Blackwater comes to be very important, in all of its emotional complexity.

The original version of the Beauty and the Beast, from Mademe Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve in 1740, “the final transformation does not occur until after the beauty weds her beast, waking up in her marriage bed to find a human Prince beside her.” In the Vale after Marillion assaults her and says he will make her “sing” just as Sandor demanded (in the literal sense of the word), she falls asleep and dreams that Sandor is lying beside her.

And she dreamed of her wedding night too, of Tyrion’s eyes devouring her as she undressed. Only then he was bigger than Tyrion had any right to be, and when he climbed into the bed his face was scarred only on one side. “I’ll have a song from you,” he rasped.

If there is one thing Sansa would rather not deal with it, it’s ambiguity, and both in her romanticization of Sandor (”He was no true knight, but he saved me all the same”) and with the unKiss, she removes ambiguity. That in turn connects to another facet of Sansa’s connection to fairytales and their heroines.

Much as in the case of the animal bridegroom, Sansa does not truly come to see Sandor in a romantic or appealing light until after her symbolic bedding, and thus in her mind transforms from a beast to a prince.

Sansa is a liar; the most consistent, pervasive and skilled liar among all the POV characters. But as is the case of the unKiss, when Sansa lies about her reality, she tells lies that have a certain ring of truth, or uses a truth to create a lie. Another example is when she tells Petyr Baelish, “I am Alayne, father. Who else would I be?” The answer for herself and the reader is obvious; She’s Sansa Stark, but Petyr is meant to take and does make an entirely different meaning from that statement. By her experience, Sandor was the only true knight she met in King’s Landing, protecting the innocent from harm and fighting valiantly. She forgets his character flaws not to the effect of distorting the truth, but trying to highlight it. If Bran and Arya are the vessels of much more specific fairytale figures, then Sansa, with layered inversions of stereotype and formula, creates a myth within ASOIAF. Bran the Builder and Queen Nymeria are established and preexisting, but it’s Sansa who writes Westeros’s version of The Beauty and the Beast.

Sansa’s narration touch upon aspects of storytelling in a metatextual way, and among them is the idea that lies and exaggeration are instrumental to bridging the gap between an experience and the audience to which the experience is narrated. Inside every story is a kernel of truth, a basis of fact, but the fact alone isn’t enough to make the reader feel as the character does. When GRRM talks about his fiction, he clearly expresses this idea. He says,

“My philosophy as a writer, since the very start of my career, has been one of ‘show, don’t tell.’ Whatever might be happening in my books, I try to put the reader into the middle of it, rather than summarizing the action. That requires vivid sensory detail. I don’t want distance, I want to put you there.

Rightly or wrongly (and in the case of ASOIAF record of sexual assault against women, I believe the latter), GRRM believes that to faithfully depict the violence, inequity and woman-hating of medieval western Europe, you have to cartoonishly exaggerate it. Like GRRM, Sansa believes in lying your way to the truth. This was the sort of lie she told Tyrion about why she did not want to sleep in the Tower of the Hand, among others. It is also expressed when she says, “Life is not a song. But all the stories can’t be lies.”

Sansa also is mentored by, and conflicts with, an incarnation of The Wicked Stepmother in the form of her would-be mother-in-law, Cersei Lannister. Frankel describes the relationship between the princess heroine and the Wicked Stepmother,

Notably, [they] only show up to bully the passive princesses. The stepmother supports her own daughters… but this upstart stepdaughter, this ugly duckling in her nest, must not be allowed to inherit-not her father’s love, not her prince’s kingdom. When she marries and becomes queen, the dowager stepmother will have nowhere left but the crone’s tower.

While the heroine understands the natural world, singing to her animal friends and picking flowers, the evil queen dominates the adult world: castle, servants, and politics. She clings to her position fiercely by keeping the princess a child or pawn. These stepmother-witches often represent the heroine’s internalized denigration of the feminine-these marriage-hungry, power thieving sexpots are dark parodies of women, devouring what they don’t control.

Though cast as the princess’s deadliest foe, the witch-queen offers priceless knowledge of sensuality and lust that virginal heroine must embrace.

This is more or less exactly who Cersei Lannister is. She fears being sidelined as an older widow by her sons’ brides-to-be, and in hates the women around her, especially Sansa, for being “weak” a.k.a being feminine:

She had a warrior’s heart but the gods in their blind malice had given her the feeble body of a woman.

“I would sooner face any number of swords than sit helpless like this, pretending to enjoy the company of this flock of frightened hens.”-Sansa, ACOK

She has total physical power over Sansa for a great deal of her time in Kings Landing, and like the Wicked Stepmother, Cersei tries to also position herself as a mentor to the younger girl and impart to her several bitter lessons about adult womanhood, as when she says, “Tears are not a woman’s only weapon. You’ve got another one between your legs, and you’d best learn to use it. You’ll find men use their swords freely enough. Both kinds of swords.” This is the knowledge of sensuality to which Frankel refers, and which Sansa uses during her first dance with Harry the Heir. Of course, Sansa lies and makes Harry believe she has more sexual experience than she actually has.

Arya Stark: The Warrior and the Feminine

 Arya acts in many ways as a narrative bridge, and much like the Titan of Braavos, will often have a foot in two different worlds but also exist in a very distinct space between them. The historical figure within ASOIAF that she is connected to, Nymeria, is neither so ancient as to become legend like the Builder, but is recent and more well described than the fictional Jonquil. The element which Arya is associated with as a “waterdancer”, is between earth and air in solidity but radically different from both; the degree to which magic effects her story is less than that of her younger brother but much more than that of her older sister, but that magic is very unique; most of her story has as of yet happened directly in the geographic center between the North and the South. More profoundly, Arya’s mythological connections are both to the male Warrior with the virtuous sword, and the primordial Mother Goddess (though the latter is more important to her). By the same exact mythological connections, Arya’s character fuses imagery of both life and death.

Campbell describes the Warrior Hero as committing their heroic deeds in a time and place where

“villages and cities have expanded over the land. Many monsters remaining from primeval times still lurk in the outlying regions, and through malice or desperation these set themselves against the human community…Furthermore, tyrants of human breed are the cause of widespread misery. The elementary deeds of the hero are the clearing of the field.”

This is an accurate description of Westeros when the story begins. As the land is tamed by human settlement and control, while wild animals and magic have receded.

“Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading. Valyria was the last ember, and Valyria is gone. The dragons are no more, the giants are dead, the children of the forest forgotten with all their lore.-Bran, ACOK

Before the First Men came all this land that you call Westeros was home to us [the Singers]…That was in the dawn of days, when our sun was rising. Now it sinks, and this is our long dwindling. The giants are almost gone as well, they who were our bane and our brothers. The great lions of the western hills have been slain, the unicorns are all but gone, the mammoths down to a few hundred. The direwolves will outlast us all, but their time will come as well. In the world that men have made, there is no room for them, or us.”-Bran, ADWD

Human civilization, especially the South, is massive, decadent, cruel and amoral. Its most respected generals are largely war criminals, its kings unworthy and incompetent. Tyrion Lannister describes his father’s military campaign as “[living] off the fat of the riverlands.” Our warrior hero witnesses the atrocities Tywin orders first hand numerous times,

Eight days she had lingered there before the Mountain gave the command to march, and every day she had seen someone die.

No one ever survived the Tickler’s questioning; no man, no woman, no child. –Arya, ACOK

Tywin is just one of the major forces by which Westeros self-destructs: the Ironborn’s revolt and the pillaging, the outlaws all over who are joined by military deserters, the coming famine, Robb Stark’s campaign in the Westerlands, and more.

Westeros is in a period of change and devolution, and it is in this period of chaos that Arya, as a warg and pack leader, comes into her own, more suited to its wildness and lawlessness than even her own father. She is both the result and the soon-to-be-cause of the Iron Throne’s fall. Jaime’s hyperfocus on getting Riverrun and Raventree to surrender while ignoring the threat of Nymeria’s wolf pack and the Brotherhood without Banners represents the myopic view and obsolete nature of the Iron Throne. It is this arrogance where, as Campbell describes, “resides [the tyrant’s] doom.”

“For the mythological hero is the champion not of things become but of things becoming: the dragon to be slain by him [sic] is precisely the monster of the status quo…From obscurity the hero emerges, but the enemy is great and conspicuous in his seat of power…He is Holdfast not because he keeps the past but because he keeps.”

Arya’s role as the Warrior Hero is actually secondary and only meant to support what is feminine in her story. Needle, the virtuous sword, is important to Arya not because of who it kills or what it can do but the lost family it represents, the agony of many mythological heroines. More physically powerful than Needle and just as meaningful is her direwolf, who is named after Queen Nymeria. It is both by the direwolf’s gathering and leading a massive wolf pack, Arya’s leadership of her own human friends, and the much bigger part she will play in the Long Night that Arya imitates the primordial Mother Goddess Frankel sees as the model for heroines.

Through ACOK and ASOS, Arya finds herself in the role of pack leader, relying on cunning, deception and evasion to survive. Like Nymeria, her most courageous and clever deeds are not those in which she herself kills or commits violence; indeed, Arya’s killings are understated in their description: brief, done in self-defense, and/or against an enemy that was already wounded or off their guard. She’s not the professional and enthusiastic kind of killer you see in full-grown and trained warriors such as Sandor Clegane, the Mountain, Bronn and Oberyn Martell:

She stuck [the stable boy] with the pointy end, driving the blade upward with a wild, hysterical strength. Needle went through his leather jerkin and the white flesh of his belly and came out between his shoulder blades. The boy dropped the pitchfork and made a soft noise, something between a gasp and a sigh. His hands closed around the blade. “Oh, gods,” he moaned, as his undertunic began to redden. “Take it out.” When she took it out, he died. –Arya, AGOT

He was bald and scared-looking, with missing teeth and a speckly grey beard, but even as she was feeling sorry for him she was killing him, shouting, “Winterfefl! Winterfell!” while Hot Pie screamed “Hot Pie!” beside her as he hacked at the man’s scrawny neck. –Arya, ACOK

[The Tickler] moved swiftly, light on his feet, never taking his eyes off Sandor Clegane. It was the easiest thing in the world for Arya to step up behind him and stab him. “Is there gold hidden in the village?” she shouted as she drove the blade up through his back. “Is there silver? Gems?” She stabbed twice more. “Is there food? Where is Lord Beric?” She was on top of him by then, still stabbing. –Arya, ASOS

TWOIAF specifies that while Nymeria wore armor, led her armies on the field and was an excellent strategist, she herself did not really do much hand-to-hand combat.

Arya’s time in Harrenhall also has imagery of the heroine princess’s enslavement, in which she has conflict very wicked stepmother-like figure: Goodwife Harra.

The actual relationships she develops in Harrenhall are not so important for Arya as much as the manner in which she escapes her captivity (Gendry and Hot Pie were important long before this): Both Arya and Sansa are given the option or the power to possibly escape by older, warrior men. Sansa is naturally afraid of Sandor as he appears to her in that moment after the Battle of the Blackwater: drunk, a moment ago was holding a blade to her throat, and also having a mental breakdown, and uncertain how far they would make it. Believing that she might be liberated by Stannis’s forces anyways, she does not go. But Arya takes what she’s learned and chooses a different path. To describe it as “violent” is misleading, because she doesn’t commit some sort of mass slaughter or go toe-to-toe with another warrior. Rather, she arm-twists an actual killer into orchestrating a coup, and then uses trickery to cut the throat of a postern guard.

After Arya drags Gendry and Hot Pie along on a shared escape from Harrenhall, and cut the throat of the postern guard, she remarks that, “Hot Pie seemed almost as terrified of her as of the men who might becoming after them. He had seen the guard she’d killed. It’s better if he’s scared of me, she told herself. That way he’ll do like I say, instead of something stupid.” (Arya, ASOS) This is paler reflection of the righteous, angry mother Goddess that Frankel describes, who scolds her children while saying, “I know what’s good for you better than you do.” It is a matter of life and death that her “pack” obeys her, and thus she makes herself the ultimate authority on right or wrong. From what can be gathered from references to Nymeria’s pack, she rules it with an iron fist, killing males that try to mate with her, hunting down the Bloody Mummer’s that are sent after Arya, and even attacking soldiers. One armed traveler remarks “they kill as they like, and they got no fear of men. It’s worth your life to go into those woods by night.”(Arya, ACOK). In the woods, at night, is exactly where Arya encounters them to go the bathroom, and the refuse to do anything more than growl at her; because they know who she is, and that makes her untouchable.

One commentator described the heroine’s journey as such: “Woman loses everything she thinks she needs, discovers her own power, and builds a family who will fight with her to the bitter end.” This is the agony of Arya’s journey, the sense that her companions always abandon her, that she is condemned to be a lone wolf for so long. If Sansa remarks that “no one will ever marry me for love,” then it is in her darkest, loneliest time that Arya says,

“But that was just stupid, like something Sansa might dream. Hot Pie and Gendry had left her just as soon as they could, and Lord Beric and the outlaws only wanted to ransom her, just like the Hound. None of them wanted her around. They were never my pack, not even Hot Pie and Gendry. I was stupid to think so, just a stupid little girl, and no wolf at all.-Arya, ASOS

In this way, they embody the different halves of the Goddess archetype: the Maiden who cannot find a truly noble and gentle suitor, and the Mother who trying to rebuild her family.

Like Bran, we can expect to see Arya absorb a part of this Abyss into her being, but without letting it become her. As darkness has “awoken” Bran’s magical powers twice already (First in the crypts, and then in Cave), Arya’s witnessing of death are catalysts of her transformation. Arya sees more death than either of siblings, and was present at the killing of both their parents.

The Kindly Man says that “only a few of His servants have been women. Women bring life into the world. We bring the gift of death. No one can do both.”

This may be the heart of why the story has taken Arya to the Faceless Men; more than just to learn stealth and cunning, she is meant to be a very special kind of hero that Campbell calls “The Master of Two Worlds”, a figure who represents the magical and divine among mortals, and can move freely across the boundary. Arya as a Queen of Wolves is meant to have the power to preserve life and deliver death.

In many world mythologies, especially those of the West, the moon is imagined as a female deity, and the sun is male. Some anthropologists have suggested that lunar calenders were first created by women who noticed how it coincided with their menstruation. Because of its presence in the dark night sky, the moon is at once associated with ability to create life and also with death, and thus these things are imprinted with femininity also. One historian of the deeply and violently patriarchal Russian peasantry noted this strange duality in their culture:

“Russian peasants identify death with women. The Psalter readers, body washers and mourners were often women, death was represented in Russian folklore as a woman with a scythe, and the Russian word for death, ‘smert’, is feminine….This ‘represented the real world turned upside down. While on earth the patriarchy controlled and subordinated women, in the world beyond women were in control and took their revenge on the patriarchy by snuffing out life.”

And they are not alone in this respect. In Westeros, the Silent Sisters prepare the dead for the afterlife, while the Stranger is neither male nor female. When the Long Night finally falls, the moon, and Nymeria’s wolf pack will be a fixture of the landscape, as will Arya.

The Return

This is the stage where our knowledge of the Stark children’s fates goes from being based in pure analysis of what has happened to so far to investigation of foreshadowing that GRRM has left for us to explicate. As an author, he has structured his fiction on maintaining a critical balance between the suspension of belief that ultimately our hero’s will survive and return (that is, that they could die or a meet a similarly terrible fate), but not “cheating” us. As he explained in a one interview:

[GRRM] As long as the twist was justified. You can’t just arbitrarily throw in twists and turns that make no sense. Things have to follow. You want the thing in the end where you say, “Oh my God, I didn’t see that coming, but there was foreshadowing; there was a hint of it here, there was a hint of it there. I should have seen it coming.” And that, to me, is very satisfying. I look for that in the fiction that I read and I try to put it into my own fiction.

[Interviewer] Like with Bran getting pushed, you foreshadow that, too, so the reader doesn’t feel cheated. Same with the Red Wedding.

There’s always this tension between fiction and life. Fiction has more structure than life does. But we have to hide the structure. We have to hide the writer, I think, and make a story seem like it was true.

Because of this, the Stark children once in the Abyss, enter a state of almost total hopelessness about ever seeing home or their family again. We are meant, as readers, to have the same fear. That is the thrill of fiction. In the new Alayne chapter, GRRM gives us a taste of a Stark who has returned from the Abyss:

Below the mountain the autumn lingered and winter wheat was ripening in the fields. Outside the window she could hear the laughter of the washerwomen at the well, the din of steel on steel from the ward where the knights were at their drills. Good sounds.

Alayne loved it here. She felt alive again, for the first since her father… since Lord Eddard Stark had died.-Sansa, TWOW

With her feet on solid ground, Sansa is able to smile, joke, tease and mock (in her thoughts) the nobles around her, and plays with her friend Myranda. She feels confident, and is more cunning and mature in her dealings with Harry the Heir.

There’s also the matter that Sansa appears to be being set up as a “dark horse” among the swirl of intrigue around her. She was the one who engineered the knights of the Vale being brought to the Bloody Gate, and is surprisingly successful with manipulating Harry the Heir during the feast. There are potent and explosive plot elements around her: Sweetrobin’s poor health, Baelish’s food stores, the coming tourney, the Mad Mouse, Sandor nearby at Quiet Isle, suggestive historical parallels, and more but two things are almost certain: Baelish’s fall and the revealing of Sansa’s true identity.

Arya’s future path is even less certain, beyond that her time with Faceless Men is running short. Her ADWD and TWOW chapters affirm this. Her warging bond with Nymeria is intense, and is pulling her home:

I should not be dreaming wolf dreams, the girl told herself. I am a cat now, not a wolf. I am Cat of the Canals. The wolf dreams belonged to Arya of House Stark. Try as she might, though, she could not rid herself of Arya. It made no difference whether she slept beneath the temple or in the little room beneath the eaves with Brusco’s daughters, the wolf dreams still haunted her by night… and sometimes other dreams as well.”-Arya, AFFC

“I can see the truth in your eyes. You have the eyes of a wolf and a taste for blood.”-Arya, ADWD

She woke with a gasp, not knowing who she was, or where.

The smell of blood was heavy in her nostrils… or was that her nightmare, lingering? She had dreamed of wolves again, of running through some dark pine forest with a great pack at her hells, hard on the scent of prey.

She took a breath to quiet the howling in her heart, trying to remember more of what she’d dreamt, but most of it had gone already. There had been blood in it, though, and a full moon overhead, and a tree that watched her as she ran.-Arya, TWOW

Many speculations have been made about how exactly Arya will return home: with the Hardhome Wildlings that were enslaved, a meeting with Daenerys, possibly wielding Dark Sister, returning through the Wall or the Riverlands or both, but whatever the route, Nymeria, her pack, Winterfell and the undead will be waiting.

Bran, too, has a foreshadowed return, in the form of a story related by Ser Bartimus, a soldier in the service of Lord Manderly, to Davos Seaworth (who will soon find himself as a cog in the former’s scheme to overthrow the Bolton’s):

When old King Edrick Stark had grown too feeble to defend his realm, the Wolf’s Den was captured by slavers from the Stepstones.

“Then a long cruel winter fell,” said Ser Bartimus. “The White Knife froze hard, and even the firth was icing up. The winds came howling from the north and drove them slavers inside to huddle round their fires, and whilst they warmed themselves the new king come down on them. Brandon Stark this was, Edrick Snowbeard’s great-grandson, him that men called Ice Eyes. He took the Wolf’s Den back, stripped the slavers naked, and gave them to the slaves he’d found chained up in the dungeons.” -Davos, ADWD.

Meta writers looking at A Dance with Dragons rightly look to this passage as yet another hammering-home on GRRM’s part that the Northmen, including the Starks, gave human sacrifices to the weirwoods and in general were more savage, brutal and primitive than the most recent Stark patriarchs: Ned and Robb.

This passage describes a situation with similarities to the current siege of Winterfell, and a king to our current Bran Stark.

Like Winterfell:

The Wolf’s Den has been taken by enemies of House Stark, with non-northerners involved.

Was lost due to the weakness of a predecessor.

Its defenders are snowed in, unable to see what’s going on outside the walls, and the blizzard is described as and probably is magical in nature.

Like our Bran Stark, the Ice-Eyes:

Was newly crowned when he made his appearance (or the rightful heir).

Shares the name of House Stark’s legendary founder.

Bran has the Tully coloring, meaning that his eyes are bright blue, which in the narrative are often described as looking like ice.

Appears to have had an especially close relationship with the Old Gods beyond just the normal worship and prayers.

It thus serves much more than just detailing blood sacrifice (which other parts of ADWD, including Bran’s weirwood visions), made clear anyway. This passage is about Bran’s return, likely as a savior for his people when Stannis triumphs over the Frey’s at Long Lake but still cannot get over the walls and is on the brink of death from starvation and exposure.

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The Stark in Winterfell: Bran and the Fisher King

ASOIAF has been called “a love letter to democracy” by the way in which it ruthlessly criticizes feudalism and kingship and by (seemingly) giving no king (and only two queens) a POV, while also presenting all the men who are able to sit the throne or wear a crown as being ultimately unworthy. There is Robert Baratheon, the Whoremonger King; his successor King Joffrey, whose claim was based on a lie and was shown to be ineffectual and ill-suited to the role in every possible way; Viserys, the Beggar King,his father Aerys, the Mad King and many others. Renly, Stannis, Balon, Euron. All fall short or fail outright.

Feudalism is displayed as an inherently violent, wasteful and repugnant social order in almost every respect. Every respect, except one: The Starks, and in particular the narrative of magic kingship that exists around Bran.

“The Stark in Winterfell” is ASOIAF’s incarnation of the Fisher King, a legendary figure from English and Welsh mythology who is spiritually and physically tied to the land, and whose fortunes, good and ill, are mirrored in the realm. It is a story that, as it tells how the king is maimed and then healed by divine power, validates that monarchy. The role of “The Stark in Winterfell” is meant to be as its creator Brandon the Builder was, a fusion of apparent opposites: man and god, king and greenseer, and the monolith that is his seat is both castle and tree, a “monstrous stone tree.”

“It was different, when there was a Stark in Winterfell”

A saying that exists in the family is invoked by both Ned and Catelyn in AGOT as they depart for the South: “There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.”

Why? When spoken, the phrase is intoned, almost like a medieval laymen of the Catholic Church might repeat a Latin prayer, not fully understanding what the words mean, but knowing that they are important somehow.

Other Great Houses do not live by this stricture: Jon Arryn was largely absent from the Vale for 14 years, with no clear plans to return, leaving his sickly son and mentally ill wife behind. Nestor Royce was his regent.  A distant cousin of Tywin Lannister, Damion, is left to rule, and no one seems particularly concerned that no Lannister of the main branch lives there. Doran Martell prefers to rule from the Water Gardens.

It is the Liddle that Bran meets in the northern mountains that gives us the clearest and most explicit reasoning for why their must always be a Stark in Winterfell:

“When there was a Stark in Winterfell, a maiden girl could walk the kingsroad in her name-day gown and still go unmolested, and travelers could find fire, bread, and salt at many an inn and holdfast. But the nights are colder now, and doors are closed.”-(Bran, ASOS)

Bran also articulates it to some degree:

He was old enough to know that it was not truly him they shouted for—it was the harvest they cheered, it was Robb and his victories, it was his lord father and his grandfather and all the Starks going back eight thousand years.Still, it made him swell with pride.” -(Bran, ACOK)

When there is a Stark in Winterfell, the land is peaceful and the people do not starve. To have a Stark in Winterfell is to by definition have good lordship. The fact that the northerners depend on the Starks for their very survival is implied by many of their vassals, and it is often the Houses that trace their very existence to the them that are the most fanatical in their loyalty.

Lyanna Mormont,whose House was given their land by Rodrik Stark angrily rejects Stannis’s demands for fealty, writing, “Bear Island knows no king but the King in the North whose name is STARK!”

Another younger northern lady, Wylla Manderly lashes out against the Freys lies about Robb and her fathers (false) disavowal of him: “The wolves took us in and nourished us and protected us against our enemies! And we swore that we would always be their men, Stark men!” -(Davos, ADWD)

Bran tells us in AGOT that the Mountain Clans, among others would, “when the snow fell and the ice winds howled out of the north, the farmers left their frozen fields and more distant holdfasts, loaded up their wagons” and took refuge in Winterfell’s winter town. When the clansmen tells Asha that he would rather see his “men die fighting for the Ned’s little girl than die than hungry in the snow, weeping tears freeze upon their cheeks”, it’s also likely that Mountain Clans are making a desperate attempt to win back their refuge.

Because of the presence of the winter town, to be the Stark in Winterfell is an immensely important office that has no equivalent anywhere else. It means being a hands-on ruler who knows his subjects intimately, and takes care of them when winter comes, which they constantly remind themselves of. Ned practices this in his own lordship of Winterfell:

Her father used to say that a lord needed to eat with his men if he hoped to keep them. “Know the men that follow you,” she heard him tell Robb once, “And let them know you. Don’t ask your men to die for a stranger.” At Winterfell, he always had a an extra seat set at his own table, and everyday a different man would be asked to join him.- (Arya, AGOT)

In western European mythology, (Western Europe being GRRM’s primary basis for Westeros), there is a family of legends known as the Fisher King. The Fisher King, also known as the Maimed or Wounded King, contains within its lineage the Welsh king Bran the Blessed. For the English, the Fisher King is a keeper of the Holy Grail. He is wounded or maimed and as a result is infertile, and is sustained only by the power of the Grail. In turn, the land becomes infertile and barren as well, and the only food to be had is fish, hence the name. In some versions, the Father is the Wounded King and his son is the Fisher. Tumblr user theelliedoll describes the connection, writing in their meta:

The point of the Fisher King as a mythical character is not so much the particularities of his character or even of his injury, but the simple fact that his (sexual)affliction is transferred to his lands. The myth thus presupposes a mystical, inextricable, sympathetic connection between king and kingdom that requires of the king a potent, generative virility, and thus functions, the myth, as the symbolic narrative that articulates a dominant power ideology [of Medieval Europe, the basis of GRRM’s Westeros]. This power ideology is the divinity of kingship, which is itself inseparable from the notions of inheritance and primogeniture.

The Fisher King myth functions then simply as a strategy of legitimation for royal authority and thus for a progressively more and more absolutist monarchy,perceived and culturally represented as the only imaginable form of government.

The Stark in Winterfell is ASOIAF’s equivalent of the Fisher King, whose personal fortunes are mirrored in the land itself. In at least two instances in narrative when the King of Winter is referred to as “The Stark in Winterfell”:

“The Stark in Winterfell wanted Bael’s head…”

“The Stark in Winterfell had to take a hand [in stopping the Night’s Watch’s rebellion] -Jon, ASOS

“He’s young King Arthur”-GRRM, about Bran

There is one character, in narrative, who is called by others and calls himself the Stark in Winterfell: Bran, son of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn:

“I’m the Prince. I’m the Stark in Winterfell.”

“You are the Stark in Winterfell, and Robb’s heir. You must look princely.” Together they garbed him as befit a lord.

He was the Stark in Winterfell, his father’s son and his brother’s heir, and almost a man grown.

-(Bran, ACOK)

And who also holds the closely associated titles of prince and heir of Winterfell:

I’m the Prince of the North, and a warg too.-(Bran, ASOS)

“You are our prince as well, our lord’s son, and our king’s true heir.” -(Meera Reed to Bran, ASOS)

Jojen gazed up at him with his dark green eyes. “There’s nothing here to hurt us,Your Grace.”-(Bran, ASOS)

“He’s our prince.”-(Meera to Samwell Tarly, ASOS)

“By night all cloaks are black, Your Grace.”-(Jojen to Bran, ASOS)

Bran’s story is also very similar to the Welsh incarnation of the Fisher King: Bran the Blessed, who fought an army of undead warriors (wights) who were continuously revived by a magic cauldron (The Heart of Winter). His half-brother, (Jon Snow) hides among the dead after a battle in order to be thrown into the cauldron (Jon mind you, might very well be warging Ghost, whose name was the last word he spoke, and the Night Watch might very well be in a state of collapse right now, if not the Wall itself) and is able to destroy it, but dies in the process. He has a name that is very similar to one of the Fisher King’s other titles, the Wounded King. The narrative calls him and he calls himself, again and again, “broken:”

Just broken. Like me, he thought.

Bran,” he said sullenly. Bran the Broken. “Brandon Stark.” The cripple boy. 

But who else would wed a broken boy like him?

And through the mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch.

Bran’s suffering because of his maiming just as Winterfell itself is “broken” establishes an sympathetic link between king and kingdom.

When GRRM said of Tolkien, whom he admires:

Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine?

-GRRM also implicitly asked the question: How can human beings, who are flawed and mortal, make for perfect monarchs, as the Fisher King is meant to be? Bran’s story, intertwined with that of his ancestor Brandon the Builder, is his answer to that question. From the very beginning, the Starks were empowered by the Old Gods. Westerosi legend has it that The Builder had the help of giants, and used the magic of the Children of the Forest to build the Wall. When Catelyn looks into the eyes of Winterfell’s heart tree, she thinks that they are “older than Winterfell itself. They had seen Brandon the Builder set the first stone, if the tales were true; watched the castles granite walls rise around them.“ (Catelyn, ACOK)

Jon Snow, another who is not a Stark patrilineally, has nightmares in which the Crypts “are not is place” and refuses Stannis’s offer to made its lord when he realizes, “The weirwood was the heart of Winterfell … but to save the castle Jon would have to tear that heart up by its ancient roots, and feed it to the red woman’s hungry fire god. I have no right. Winterfell belongs to the old gods.” (Jon, ASOS)

When Rickon took the Walder’s down to the Crypts, Bran is enraged: “You had no right! That was our place, a Stark place!”

It is no accident that the tales suggest that the heart tree, “the heart of Winterfell” is said to have witnessed the Builder’s construction. In fact, in the North, the heart tree is used as a witness for vows of all kinds, including marriages and contracts. Ramsay and “Arya” say their vows in front of a heart tree, and Jojen tells Bran that “[The Children had ] no ink, no parchment, no written language. Instead they had the trees, and the weirwoods above all.” Piecing together what we learn about House Stark’s history on TWOIAF, we can read how the growth of their domain was not only reflected in how Winterfell’s growth “over the centuries, like some monstrous stone tree”, but that there was a deeper purpose to the wars they waged. They killed the warg Gaven Greywolf in the “War of the Wolves” and the Warg King of Sea Dragon Point, killing his greenseers and taking his daughters as prizes. These might have been the historical events that led Haggon to say, “South of the Wall, the kneelers hunt us down and butcher us like pigs.” Theon Stark the Laughing Wolf killed the Marsh King and married his daughter, and it is commonly rumored the crannogmen intermarried with the Children of the Forest. Based on Howland’s visit the Isle of Faces and Jojen’s status as a greendreamer we can suppose that they have close connections with the Old God’s magic, intermarriage or not.

The reason for these wars against other practitioners of northern magic goes all the way back to Brandon Builder, who I will hypothesis was also the Last Hero, as it was Winterfell and the Wall that managed to achieve what the Last Hero had set out to do:

So as cold and death filled the earth, the last hero determined to seek out the Children, in the hopes that their ancient magics could win back what the armies of men had lost. 

It goes back to a grand pact he made with the Children 8000 years ago: In exchange for their magical aid, to be sole rightful possessor of that magic, and mandate to conquer the North, the Builder and his descendents would give sacrifices to the Old Gods, preserve their weirwoods, and hold the Others at bay. The entire purpose of House Stark’s motto is expressed in “Winter is Coming”. It is not a boast, it is commonly observed, but it is something more as well. It is a justification for their right to rule. By absorbing the magic in the blood of the Warg King and the Marsh King, the Kings of Winter were acting on that compact. As the Fisher King, namely King Arthur, kept the Holy Grail, so do the Starks keep the heart tree, drawing from it power and legitimacy.

The Builder himself is highly likely to have been a greenseer, fusing with the heart tree as a part of his pact with the Old Gods to become the first Stark in Winterfell. “Bran” means “raven” in Welsh and Bloodravens tell Bran that messages were sent by raven by skinchanging into them:

 It was the Singers who taught the First Men to send messages by raven… but in those days, the birds would speak the words. The trees remember, but men forget, and so now they write the messages on parchment and tie them round the feet of birds who have never shared their skin.”-(Bran, ADWD)

This is not an accident, as GRRM has stated that the names of his characters were chosen with “a fair amount of thought.” Only two individuals are confirmed in narrative to be able to skinchange ravens, and both of them were greenseers. The kings in the Age of Heroes, the Builder among them, are said to have lived for hundreds of years, a feet which is exactly what greenseers do by using the weirwoods as a kind of supernatural life support in old age. Jojen deepens our understanding of the role of the weirwoods when he says:

“When [the singers and greenseers] died, they went into the wood, into leaf and limb and root, and the trees remembered. All their songs and spells, their histories and prayers, everything they knew about this world. The singers believe that they are the old gods. When singers die they become part of that godhood. -(Bran, ADWD)

If the Builder was in fact a greenseer, and the Winterfell heart tree his ultimate resting place (recall the cool black pool next to it, that nobody has ever seen the bottom of), as he is strongly evidenced to be, then that means that Brandon’s journey has been under the direct gaze of his ancestor from the very beginning. When Bran first speaks of the heart tree, he says that it "had always frightened him; Trees ought not to have faces…nor leaves that look like hands.”

As Bran’s grooming as the Builder’s heir continues, he falls increasingly under its influence, drawn to the weirwoods more and more, but especially to the heart tree:

Bran had always liked the godswood, even before, but of late he found himself drawn to it more and more. Even the heart tree no longer scared him the way it used to. The deep red eyes carved into the pale trunk still watched him, yet somehow he took comfort from that now. The gods were looking over him, he told himself; the old gods, gods of the Starks and the First Men and the children of the forest, his father’s gods. He felt safe in their sight, and the deep silence of the trees helped him think. Bran had been thinking a lot since his fall; thinking, and dreaming, and talking with the gods.-(Bran, ACOK)

“It was a queer kind of tree, skinnier than any other weirwood that Bran had ever seen and faceless as well, but it made him feel as if the old gods were with him here, at least.”-(Bran, ASOS)

The heart tree in Winterfell saw the laying of the first stone, and it was in the godswood that Bran made his final climb atop Winterfell’s walls. Summer notably, howled fearfully as he did, sensing that something terrible was about to happen just Grey Wind did outside the Twins: 

He was halfway up the tree, moving easily from limb to limb, when the wolf got to his feet and began to howl. Bran looked back down. His wolf fell silent, staring up at him through slitted yellow eyes. A strange chill went through him. He began to climb again. Once more the wolf howled. “Quiet,” he yelled. “Sit down. Stay. You’re worse than Mother.” The howling chased him all the way up the tree, until finally he jumped off onto the armory roof and out of sight.

The Old Gods, and Bloodraven, are strongly to implied to have foreseen his fate, just as Summer sensed it. They have entirely intended that he will play his role in the saga and fulfill the pact, whether he wants to or not:

“Most of him has gone into the tree … He has lived beyond his mortal span, and yet he lingers. For us, for you, for the realms of men. Only a little strength remains in his flesh. He has a thousand eyes and one, but there is much to watch. One day you will know.”

I have watched you for a long time, watched you with a thousand eyes and one. I saw your birth, and that of your lord father before you. I saw your first step, heard your first word, was part of your first dream. I was watching when you fell. And now you are come to me at last, Brandon Stark, though the hour is late.” -(Bran, ADWD)

GRRM’s answer to the question “How can mortal me be perfect kings?” is evident in Bran’s narrative: Only by becoming something not completely human at all, to have godly and immortal things, such as the weirwood, fused into your being, and hence to become more or less than completely human, depending on your perspective. This is the only type of monarchy GRRM gives legitimacy, the kind where the king suffers on his journey and is almost dehumanized for the sake of his people. The Last Hero (the Builder) in his search for the Children, saw all 12 of his companions die. Jojen now lies close to death, and tells Bran that:

“Earth and water, soil and stone, oaks and elms and willows, they were here before us all and will still remain when we are gone.” “So will you,” said Meera. That made Bran sad. What if I don’t want to remain when you are gone?-he almost asked.-(Bran, ADWD)

Bran will outlive his friends, Meera and Jojen. Though he will be reunited with his siblings, Arya, Sansa, Rickon, even Jon, and his life with them will be happy, Bran will outlive them too, and their children. He will outlive Nymeria and Shaggydog and Ghost, and even Summer. Bloodraven tells him:

“I have my own ghosts, Bran. A brother that I loved, a brother that I hated, a woman I desired. Through the trees, I see them still, but no word of mine has ever reached them. The past remains the past.” (Bran, ADWD)

Through the heart tree of Winterfell, Bran will in old age be as Bloodraven is now, “half-corpse and half-tree…less a man than some ghastly statue made of twisted wood, old bone,“ and awash in the memories of a happy childhood that is lost to him: He and Arya running playing with stick swords in the godswood; climbing the stone walls while Arya and Sansa have a snowball fight; a father who sits by the fire “speaking softly of the age of heroes and the children of the forest”; a mother ordering him to get down lest he should fall; Jon and Robb training in the yard. Toward the end of his life, Bran will not so much be a human being as a vessel and conduit of the magical energies that are the source of House Stark’s power. He will be a king where “he had never asked to be a prince”, a greenseer where “it was knighthood he had always dreamed of”: He will be the Stark in Winterfell, bound to the place first by the paralyzing of his legs, his wedding to the direwolf and the trees, and then his physical binding to the heart tree itself.

Whatever Faustian Bargain the Builder made for the Children’s aid, it’s clear that he didn’t just offer himself: he offered up his heirs. Bran’s journey, his grooming as lord, warg and now greenseer is a mechanization possibly thousands of years in the making. Even Bran himself comes to view the role of lord, the Stark in Winterfell, as his destiny, his only choice:

Why must he waste his time listening to old men speak of things he only half understood? Because you’re broken, a voice reminded him. A lord on his cushioned chair might be crippled, but not a knight on his destier. Besides, it was his duty. -(Bran, ACOK)

After he has looked deep into the Heart of Winter, the Three-Eyed Crow tells him, “Now you know why you must live…because winter is coming.”

The New Age

The extent of the Singers’ aid to Bran, House Stark and the realm brings to mind the question: Why? Why would they do this? They live in a warded cave, and are nearing extinction any case, so what does it matter to them that humankind in Westeros could be wiped out? The Answer lies in Leaf’s foretelling of the years that lie ahead:

Gone down into the earth … Into the stones, into the trees.  Before the First Men came all this land that you call Westeros was home to us, yet even in those days we were few.  The gods gave us long lives but not great numbers, lest we overrun the world as deer will overrun a wood where there are no wolves to hunt them.  That was in the dawn of days when our sun was rising.  Now it sinks, and this is our long dwindling.  The giants are almost gone as well, they who were our bane and our brothers. The great lions of the western hills have been slain, the unicorns are all but gone, the mammoths down to a few hundred.  The direwolves will outlast us all, but their time will come as well.  In the world that men have made, there is no room for them, or us. (Bran, ADWD)

Leaf is foretelling the death of all the magical and elder races of the world, even direwolves. Given that the magic of the weirwoods includes powers of prophecy, perhaps she will be proven correct, perhaps not. What is significant however is what it isn’t been foretold to die out: the weirwoods and the blood sacrifices given to them are what the magic of Westeros comes from. Where human settlement has declined, the weirwoods return, as Brienne discovered in the Whispers and Bran in the Nightfort. Both found young, skinny, faceless weirwoods. The Andal civilization that fears and burns wild weirwoods is also dying out, as the South collapses in violence and famine.

The explanation lies in the weirwoods, and in their aid to Bran and by extension the realm: They intend that humanity will be the heirs to their stewardship of the sacred trees that hold the souls of their ancestors and their memory. Humanity, unlike the Singers, reproduces rapidly, and whatever the exact origin of the Others (whether as weapon created by the Singers that backfired, or as some theorists suggest, skinchangers that accomplished what Varamyr failed to do by using male infants such as Craster’s offerings, or something else entirely), it is only since the arrival of mankind that the Others have entered the historical record. The Others are acting as a cosmic fail-safe for a humanity that would deplete the land like ”deer will overrun a wood where there are no wolves to hunt them.“ The Others are the wolves to hunt humans, the ice to bring balance to the fire. The Starks in Winterfell act as one of the keepers of that balance, the lock on a gate that keeps a dark power at bay, just as the Valyrians were for whatever lay deep in the Fourteen Fires. They will keep this balance until perhaps they in turn meet the same fate as the Singers and are replaced by another invader from Essos. It is no surprise that Winterfell appears to be designed with fighting the Others and their wights in mind.

The Sacred of Green Men is suggested to have combined themselves in some way with the land based on their green skin, magical aura and stewardship of a powerful grove of weirwoods, and are certain to play some part in this design, though it is still very unclear what that part is, as are the details of that design.   

Conclusion

There is a directly parallel relationship between the different mythical figures and the sources of their power:

The Fisher King and the Holy Grail

The Greenseer and the weirwood trees

The Stark and Winterfell

In every case, there is a drawing of supernatural strength and even divinity from an entity that acts as a bridge from the present to something much greater: Winterfell to the ancient past, the weirwood to godhood, the Holy Grail to the Christian creator. The image of the Fisher King in ASOIAF is created from fusing together the role of King of Winter to that of greenseer, and in turn that of Winterfell to the heart tree. It relies on a web of grafting between various and unlike beings: As this meta writer states,

Symbolically, the graft imagines the sudden joining of unlike things - a fusion that may be either disruptive or transformative.  Grafting represents not only a horticultural practice, but also a way of understanding the permeable and productive boundaries between self and other, human and nonhuman, as well as the connections between past, present, and future…

Perhaps most importantly, grafting elides notions of primogeniture and strict ideas of kinship, introducing uncertainty into Renaissance distinctions between high and low, animal and plant, human and nonhuman.

The Stark in Winterfell by his nature is meant to be a greenseer, and his binding to the castle is made one with his binding to the heart tree. Through this in turn, Winterfell acquires the aspect of a tree as the weirwood has aspects of stone. Each becomes like the other, fused into practically one being, just as the king acquires qualities of godhood and in the case of the Christian Creator, the god is thought of as a king ("king of kings, who dost from thy throne gaze down upon thee”). Winterfell, is never said to have been “built” in the narrative. Rather, “Thousands and thousands of years ago, Brandon the Builder had raised Winterfell, and some said the Wall.“-(Bran, AGOT). "Raising”, in the way that you “raise” a child or crop, is the way in which you deal with something that is organic, living, with sentience of its own. Bran also notices that those that “built” Winterfell “had not leveled the earth…there were hills and valleys beyond the walls.” Winterfell is asymetrical and irregular, as living and organic things are. This image is strongly imprinted onto it that is said that “the place had grown over the centuries like some monstrous stone tree…and its branches were gnarled and thick and twisted, its roots sunk deep into the earth.”  Each is made stronger and by these relationships, with the Stark in Winterfell serving as the human conduit.

In the same way that Winterfell becomes like a tree, weirwood has aspects of being somehow not of the world of flesh-and-blood. A Blackwood observes of one weirwood, “For a thousand years it has not shown a leaf. In another thousand it will have turned to stone…Weirwoods never rot.” Many times in the narrative, weirwood is compared to bone, smooth and white, and bone is a tissue of the body that lingers long after death, separate from living flesh. The Builder is also associated with Storm’s End “Some said the children of the forest helped him build it, shaping the stones with magic; others claimed that a small boy told him what he must do, a boy who would grow to be Bran the Builder.”-(Catelyn, ACOK)

Understanding that the Builder as the Fisher King resolves many contradictions in his story, namely the idea that a man went to a race of beings who made their homes from wood and leaf to learn how to a build a stone castle. There was a purpose much beyond learning; he went to propose a union: human civilization and primordial forest, to create a monolith that is both castle and tree, ruled by a man that is both king and shaman, as it was meant to be. And as it will be, by the only king in Westeros that GRRM and his story values and honors:

Brandon Stark, the heir to Winterfell, son of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn.

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The Invisibility and Anonymity of the Stark in Winterfell: More about Bran and the Fisher King

The central founding figures and institutions of House Stark, Brandon the Builder and the Stark in Winterfell, have an intriguing quality attached to them: anonymity and/or invisibility.

The first time that the office is mentioned, it is expressed as a condition that must be:

“There must always be a Stark in Winterfell”

The Liddle Bran, the Reeds and Hodor meet in the northern mountains describes the office in a similar sort of way, much like the mythological figure of the Fisher King, in the sense of his existence being essential to the prosperity of the realm:

“When there was a Stark in Winterfell, a maiden girl could walk the kingsroad in her name-day gown and still go unmolested, and travelers could find fire, bread, and salt at many an inn and holdfast. But the nights are colder now, and doors are closed.”-Bran, ASOS

The important qualities of the Stark in Winterfell become even more clearer in light of GRRM’s own words about the first Stark in Winterfell, Brandon the Builder:

No one can even say for certain if Brandon the Builder ever lived. He is as remote from the time of the novels as Noah and Gilgamesh are from our own time.

In other words, the Stark in Winterfell, even when discussing a particular Stark, is less an actual person to northerners than a concept. He is very rarely given a distinct personality, and likewise, those with distinct personalities are not given the title on page, the only two exceptions being Bran son of Eddard and Catelyn, and Brandon the Daughterless (who in some sense is not an exception, but more on that later). Ned and Robb each were technically the Stark in Winterfell for a time, but never called that on page, nor are the various kings that Bran describes who now rest in the crypts.

Durran Godsgrief, Lann the Clever, Garth Greenhand and other figures from the Age of Heroes are described with unique personalities or qualities to at least some extent, but not the founder of House Stark. Indeed, his legendary title encapstulates everything that matters about him and the tales we read on page; not who he was, but what he did, what he built. We nothing of what he was like as a person because it doesn’t matter, anymore than the personality of the Stark in Winterfell matters. The Brandon of our time knows this to be especially true:

“Men crowded shoulder to shoulder on the benches. “Stark!” they called as Bran trotted past, rising to their feet. “Winterfell! Winterfell!” He was old enough to know that it was not truly him they shouted for—it was the harvest they cheered, it was Robb and his victories, it was his lord father and his grandfather and all the Starks going back eight thousand years.”

When the snow fell and the ice winds howled down out of the north, Old Nan said, farmers left their frozen fields and distant holdfasts, loaded up their wagons, and then the winter town came alive.-Bran, AGOT

It is what he represents and does for them that counts, not his personal whims, likes, dislikes or character. He is almost anonymous, subsumed into the office. During the readers’ time with Bran in Winterfell, he is almost immediately given a characteristic shared by the Stark in Winterfell and sometimes by those who have physical disabilities; a sense of being invisible:

When he got out from under it and scrambled up near the sky, Bran could see all of Winterfell in a glance. He liked the way it looked, spread out beneath him, only birds wheeling over his head while all the life of the castle went on below. Bran could perch for hours among the shapeless, rain-worn gargoyles that brooded over the First Keep, watching it all: the men drilling with wood and steel in the yard, the cooks tending their vegetables in the glass garden, restless dogs running back and forth in the kennels, the silence of the godswood, the girls gossiping beside the washing well. It made him feel like he was lord of the castle, in a way even Robb would never know…

People never looked up. That was another thing he liked about climbing; it was almost like being invisible.-Bran, AGOT

He is incredibly and intimately familiar with his subjects rhythms of life and the layout of the castle, and will soon become essential, but is almost completely invisible. Bran is not the only (disabled, it should be noted) ruler in Westeros who feels invisible but is also dutiful. Tyrion, while as the Acting Hand, was attentive and serious about confronting the various crises in Kings Landing, but is demonized nonetheless by much of the population:

“We have become swollen, bloated, foul. Brother couples with sister in the bed of kings, and the fruit of their incest capers in his palace to the piping of a twisted little monkey demon.-A preacher on the streets of KL, the “monkey” he refers to is Tyrion.

I saved you all, Tyrion thought. I saved this vile city and all your worthless lives. There were hundreds in the throne room, every one of them laughing.-Tyrion, ASOS

Tywin takes all the credit for saving Kings Landing, and Tyrion’s part is totally ignored.

That brings up another essential peculiarity about the Stark in Winterfell: In many times and places of the Medieval Europe, including England upon which Westeros is based, kings were traditionally itinerant. They traveled from their realms constantly, holding audiences and meeting subjects, noble and peasant. This was often necessary because without any type of high-speed communication, the average subject wouldn’t even know what their sovereign looked like, and in times of war the situation would be even more chaotic. There was no other way for the sovereign to make his existence real in the minds of his subjects,

But the model presented by the Starks in almost completely opposite; in a realm much larger, likely much less densely populated than the medieval European realms of England, France, and Germany, the model of the perfect monarch is one who scarcely leaves his castle. To some extent this is explained by the Winter Town and communication by raven rather than horse messenger, but it’s seems doubtful that the entire North would all be able to fit there. Surely, other holdfasts in the outer regions serve as places of refuge (after all, how did those people survive when during the Age of Heroes, the Barrow Kings, Red Kings and others were at war with Winterfell?)

Again, why? Deeply hidden in the text is the answer: Bran the Builder was a greenseer, and his ancestors, and those of whom were not greenseers themselves entombed themselves on thrones of stone at Winterfell’s roots as a greenseer does with the weirwood in imitation of their ancestor. After a certain point in his life, as he became more feeble, the Builder would simply have never left his castle, physically bound as he was to the heart tree to extend his life. His continued life and presence their made possible the continued building of other castles in the North, the Hightower, the Wall and Winterfell itself.

Most of his subjects might never lay eyes on him except for those who get an audience, but his eyes were everywhere. He was almost omnipresent and omniscient, utterly invisible and anonymous to his subjects but utterly essential to their lives, especially during the winter. He never rode into the battle, and probably scarcely ever did while he still walked on his own two feet. This means that his personhood vanished from their mental image of him, and that quality of the northerner’s mental image of the Stark in Winterfell has continued to the present.

Which brings us to the one apparent on-page exception that rule: Brandon the Daughterless.

On the surface, it seems as though the Daugtherless is the only person to be called the Stark in Winterfell and be given a personality. But even here, we see that like other aspects of the House Stark narrative and the Brandon of current time, this story functions to reinforce the idea of the Stark in Winterfell as ASOIAF’s Fisher King. The crisis of the Daughterless is the same as the Arthurian figure: the inability to produce heirs:

“Lord Brandon had no other children. At his behest, the black crows flew forth from their castles in the hundreds, but nowhere could they find any sign o’ Bael or this maid. For most a year they searched, till the lord lost heart and took to his bed, and it seemed as though the line o’ Starks was at its end.-Jon, ACOK

Bran’s similar condition as the heir to Winterfell is the same:

But he will never run beside his wolf again, he thought with a sadness too deep for words, or lie with a woman, or hold his own son in his arms.-Ned, AGOT

(the first of which, of course, he is already wrong about thanks to magic, and that’s important). Like the Holy Grail, Winterfell is something that can never be owned or controlled by someone who is not a Stark, passed down from one king to the next (with the Daughterless’s grandson apparently the only exception of inheritance through the female line, and GRRM has said there has never been a reigning Queen in the North);

Ned Stark’s tree, he thought, and Stark’s wood, Stark’s castle, Stark’s sword, Stark’s gods. This is their place, not mine.-Theon, ACOK

That wood was Winterfell. It was the north. I never felt so out of place as I did when I walked there, so much an unwelcome intruder. He wondered if the Greyjoys would feel it too. The castle might well be theirs, but never that godswood. Not in a year, or ten, or fifty.-Tyrion, ACOK

Not ever, in fact.

How will the current crisis of inheritance be resolved, which is as much literary problem as a physical one. The only other living Stark male is Rickon, who not only has no POV, but no narrative or king imagery attached to him at all, making the scenario of his inheriting a deus ex machina, and according to GRRM you can’t “arbitrarily throw in twists and turns that make no sense.” Sansa also has very little monarchical references in her narrative or the same kind of connections to Winterfell’s past, and Arya similarly views it entirely in terms of the home of the “pack”, not a queen who desires to rule it (the aforementioned wolf pack however, is a totally different story (X). Jon Snow has already rejected offers to ruler Winterfell before, and has dreams where the “Stone kings” tell him that he does belong in the crypts. In contrast, Bran remarks that, “[the crypts] were part of his home and who he was, and he had always known that one day he would lie there, too.”(Bran, ACOK)

The solution to Bran’s apparent infertility is the same as that of Brandon the Daughterless, the (healing?) waters of the cool black pool in the godswood:

A woman heavy with child emerged naked and dripping from the black pool, knelt before the tree, and begged the old gods for a son who would avenge her.-Bran’s vision through Winterfell’s heart tree

One night as he lay waiting to die, Lord Brandon heard a child’s cry. He followed the sound and found his daughter back in her bedchamber, asleep with a babe at her breast.” “Bael had brought her back?” “No. They had been in Winterfell all the time, hiding with the dead beneath the castle. The maid loved Bael so dearly she bore him a son, the song says… though if truth be told, all the maids love Bael in them songs he wrote.-Jon, ACOK

How can you swim in there?” he asked Osha. “Isn’t it cold?”

“As a babe I suckled on icicles, boy. I like the cold.” Osha swam to the rocks and rose dripping. She was naked, her skin bumpy with gooseprickles. Summer crept close and sniffed at her. “I wanted to touch the bottom.”

“I never knew there was a bottom.”

“Might be there isn’t.” She grinned.-Bran and Osha, after her dive down into the cool black pool, AGOT

“The river you hear is swift and black, and flows down and down to a sunless sea. And there are passages that go even deeper…-Leaf, about the caverns below the Cave of the Three-Eyed Crow

Clearly the pool is connected to something other than the hot springs that keep the castle warm through the winter. What seems likely is that whatever Osha found deep below, it also is connected to the Cave just like Gorne’s Way.

And since Bran’s sense of “brokenness” is so closely associated with the breaking of Winterfell, and his infertility with that of the North now that Winter has come,

“The stone is strong. Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I’m not dead either.”-Bran, ACOK

-it would follow that when he is restored to Winterfell and it is rebuilt, he will be healed in some kind of way. Not in the sense of being able to walk again on his own two legs, but like the Fisher King be healed in a holistic sense by being able to live up to the legacy of his ancient inheritance and fulfill that duty, which includes being able to have children (that presumably will be possible through either explicit magic or GRRM’s own power as the author). Bran’s time in the Cave has taught him that magic alone won’t be enough:

He had thought the three-eyed crow would be a sorcerer, a wise old wizard who could fix his legs, but that was some stupid child’s dream, he realized now. I am too old for such fancies, he told himself. A thousand eyes, a hundred skins, wisdom deep as the roots of ancient trees.-Bran, ADWD

The reader knows Bran as a “sweet boy, quick to laugh, easy to love,” but in the ages after the end of the ADOS, none of that will matter to the North. Bran will be much like the monoliths he will restore in their eyes: faceless, constant, so deeply embedded into his subject’s lives that they call attention to him only to remark with reverence. They will know him as the Rebuilder, the king whose return brought with it the summer, whose healing and restored fertility meant the fertility of the land, and the Winterfell he will rebuild and maintain is their refuge when the Winter comes again.